t involved success and fortune for us. In
due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself
delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for
it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to
Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused
long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to
him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity
was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage
without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that
effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King
Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout
the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the
real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with
those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. In this
effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible.
At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get
himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have
shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him.
He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he
did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in
whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was
where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a
theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.

Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He
went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in
visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of
failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: "Here is
a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor
known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We
are fools." Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he
agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the
stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But
Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and
title I had in