ce--absolute proof of good reading. But you couldn't
read worth a damn a few years ago. I do not say this to flatter. It is
true I looked around for you when I was leaving, but you had already
gone.

Alas, Osgood has failed at last. It was easy to see that he was on the
very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he
was still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but I continued to
hope--but not expect that he would pull through. The Library of Humor is
at his dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it.

To save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure,
perhaps you had better send down and get it. I told him, the other day,
that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for
its delivery to you.

In two days General Grant has dictated 50 pages of foolscap, and thus
the Wilderness and Appomattox stand for all time in his own words. This
makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first.

He looks mighty well, these latter days.

Yrs Ever
MARK.

"I am exceedingly glad," wrote Howells, "that you approve of my
reading, for it gives me some hope that I may do something on the
platform next winter.... but I would never read within a hundred
miles of you, if I could help it. You simply straddled down to the
footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and
tickled it."

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, July 21, 1885.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You are really my only author; I am restricted to you,
I wouldn't give a damn for the rest.

I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored
and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome
people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent
blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what
not, and nearly died from the overwork. I wouldn't read another of those
books for a farm. I did try to read one other--Daniel Deronda. I dragged
through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest
enough to quit, and confess to myself that I haven't any romance
literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books.

But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian
Summer, and to my mind there