enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript,
thought it especially good. "Livy wouldn't have it," he said, "so I gave
it up." There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber," strong and fine in
conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover
who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and
cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into subterranean
passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty
years. The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story.
Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste
or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other
items of garbage were thrown. This he thought sufficient, but Mrs.
Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device. Clemens could
think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned
to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study. To Howells
and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and
they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the
sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.

"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never
entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication
by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
even in this day of wider toleration.

It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the
manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She became
his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded,
clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's reputation it would have
been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more
actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she
had been even more severe. She did all that lay in her strength, from
the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life
together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary
story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote
her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.

LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success
in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providenc