wells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Sunday.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all
night at the Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and
take breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you,
and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
late at night, or something like that? That sort of thing rouses Mrs.
Clemens's sympathies, easily; the only trouble is to keep them up.
Twichell and I talked till 2 or 3 in the morning, the night we supped at
your house and it restored his health, on account of his being drooping
for some time and made him much more robuster than what he was before.
Will Mrs. Howells let you?

Yrs ever,
S. L. C.

Aldrich had issued that year a volume of poems, and he presented
Clemens with a copy of it during this Boston visit. The letter of
appreciation which follows contains also reference to an amusing
incident; but we shall come to that presently.

*****

To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.

FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD.

Dec. 18, 1874.

MY DEAR ALDRICH,--I read the "Cloth of Gold" through, coming down in the
cars, and it is just lightning poetry--a thing which it gravels me to
say because my own efforts in that line have remained so persistently
unrecognized, in consequence of the envy and jealousy of this
generation. "Baby Bell" always seemed perfection, before, but now that
I have children it has got even beyond that. About the hour that I was
reading it in the cars, Twichell was reading it at home and forthwith
fell upon me with a burst of enthusiasm about it when I saw him. This
was pleasant, because he has long been a lover of it.

"Thos. Bailey Aldrich responded" etc., "in one of the brightest speeches
of the evening."

That is what the Tribune correspondent says. And that is what everybody
that heard it said. Therefore, you keep still. Don't ever be so unwise
as to go on trying to unconvince those people.

I've been skating around the place all day with some girls, with Mrs.
Clemens in the window to do the applause. There would be a power of fun
in skating if you could do it with somebody else's muscles.--There are
about twenty boys booming by the house, now, and it is might