r valuable or not; but it is
curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so
far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at last,
of inherent misconstruction. The title was to be, "A Murder and a
Marriage." Clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not
bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day.

The Atlantic started its "Contributors' Club," and Howells wrote to
Clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject,
assuring him that he could "spit his spite" out at somebody or something
as if it were a passage from a letter. That was a fairly large
permission to give Mark Twain. The paragraph he sent was the sort of
thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of
Howells's necessity of rejecting it. In the accompanying note he said:

Say, Boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? I
suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so.

He was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently
enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. Yet they were
constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water
gem. Mary Mopes Dodge, of St. Nicholas, wrote time and again, and
finally said:

"I know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted."

In his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary
attention to one of his favorite books, Pepys' Diary, that captivating
old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the
infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. He had been reading
diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary
record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the
phrase of the period. The result was Fireside Conversation in the Time
of Queen Elizabeth, or, as he later called it, 1601. The "conversation,"
recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the
outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside
sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy,
vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of
convention. Howells has spoken of Mark Twain's "Elizabethan breadth of
parlance," and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes
and corners the letters in which Clemens had "loosed his bold fancy to
stoop on rank suggestion." "I could not bear to burn them," he de