h was to be a continuation of Tam
Sawyer--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, here is a curious phase
of genius. The novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm
and faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new
tale, he says:

"I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have gone, and may possibly
pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done"--this of the story
which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. He
did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was
about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years.

He wrote one short tale, "The Canvasser's Story," a burlesque of no
special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of
"blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known
authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can
easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his
impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether 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'