ed by registers
connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by Jonathan
Edwards, Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang to
the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures
him is the means of making the righteous comfortable.

Then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were
to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as "Lockjaw Harris,"
"Influenza Smith," "Sinapism Davis," and a dozen or two more, a perfect
outbreak of disorders.

Another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to
present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live for
a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year after
year, subsisting on polar bears and other Arctic game.

An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night,
in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the
Sultan to death. That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells
came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the
opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed
to him that he was "made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from
Scheherazade's prolixity."

"On the whole," he said, "it is not your best, nor your second best; but
all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to
indulge in."

And that was the truth. So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to
seclusion, and there remains to this day.

Clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary,
but historical, due to his familiarity with English dates. He wrote
Twichell:

Day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, I left
the study, but I couldn't hold in--had to do something; so I spent
eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of
the English kings on the roads in these grounds, from William the
Conqueror to 1883, calculating to invent an open-air game which
shall fill the children's heads with dates without study. I give
each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake
in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the
children call the stake by the king's name. You can stand in the
door and take a bird's-eye view of English monarchy, from the
Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up
the hill to the s