nted out the author's share of the gate money, and sent him a note
of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about
dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.

One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air
before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in.

By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he
sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever
gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden
surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though
he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel
Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I
found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I
represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we
should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective
schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little
plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States
and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public
stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off
it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly
nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was
willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the
same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according
to Clemens's intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his
superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The
exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served
our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose
specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an
ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance
ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor
upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a
marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any
emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way.

We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things
out