fire up again on your fiction-mill and give us another good
promise. And this time keep it--for it is your turn to be astonished.
Come and stay as long as you possibly can. I invented a new copyright
extension scheme last Friday, and sat up all night arranging its
details. It will interest you. Yesterday I got it down on paper in as
compact a form as I could. Harvey and I have examined the scheme, and
to-morrow or next day he will send me a couple of copyright-experts to
arrange about getting certain statistics for me.

Authors, publishers and the public have always been damaged by the
copyright laws. The proposed amendment will advantage all three--the
public most of all. I think Congress will pass it and settle the vexed
question permanently.

I shall need your assent and the assent of about a dozen other authors.
Also the assent of all the large firms of the 300 publishers. These
authors and publishers will furnish said assent I am sure. Not even the
pirates will be able to furnish a serious objection, I think.

Come along. This place seemed at its best when all around was
summer-green; later it seemed at its best when all around was burning
with the autumn splendors; and now once more it seems at its best, with
the trees naked and the ground a painter's palette.

Yours ever,
MARK.

Clemens was a great admirer of the sea stories of W. W. Jacobs and
generally kept one or more of this author's volumes in reach of his
bed, where most of his reading was done. The acknowledgment that
follows was sent when he had finished Salthaven.

*****

To W. W. Jacobs, in England:

REDDING, CONN,
Oct. 28, '08.

DEAR MR. JACOBS,--It has a delightful look. I will not venture to say
how delightful, because the words would sound extravagant, and would
thereby lose some of their strength and to that degree misrepresent me.
It is my conviction that Dialstone Lane holds the supremacy over all
purely humorous books in our language, but I feel about Salthaven as the
Cape Cod poet feels about Simon Hanks:

"The Lord knows all things, great and small,
With doubt he's not perplexed:
'Tis Him alone that knows it all
But Simon Hanks comes next."

The poet was mov