, or by reading it over gain an
inspiration in writing you. . .

Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to
Elmira. He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of
something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the
circuit. He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the
attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.
Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always. It was always a
temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was
none the less distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote:

I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder
to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough,
and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don't want to get
wedded to it as they are.

He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized presently that with
her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. What he
lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that
direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away. She became
his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held
to her death. The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's
wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength
she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those early
days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of
revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
day, and from year to year, even to the very end.

The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that
would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he settles the
question of title, which he says is to be:

THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
or
THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the
deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words