e unsuccessful dramatist
die."--[This was as late as the spring of 1886, at which time Howells's
faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. In one letter he wrote: "It is
a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might
amuse, I'm afraid that in three he would simply bore."

And again:

"As it stands, I believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace
to have it succeed."]

CXLVIII

CABLE AND HIS GREAT JOKE

Meanwhile, with the completion of the Sellers play Clemens had flung
himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent
impetuosity than ever. Howells had hardly returned to Boston when he
wrote:

Now let's write a tragedy.

The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was
a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. I read the
incident in Carlyle's Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my
note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of
a possible tragedy, to see how it might work.

If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit--hey?
It's right in the big historical times--war; Cromwell in big, picturesque
power, and all that.

Come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. Curious, but didn't
Florence want a Cromwell? But Cromwell would not be the chief figure
here.

It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which
he would later make his story, "The Death Disc." Howells was too tired
and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so
Clemens went steaming ahead alone.

My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich
Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled
with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge
of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and
fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive
will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that
the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what
apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its
place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill
Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the
midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and
amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival
of the missionaries and--the erection of a