rly, and delicious.

He went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings
were complete he wrote again:

Hold me under permanent obligations. What luck it was to find you!
There are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of
mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it
was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs and
caught a meteor. Live forever!

This was not too much praise. Beard realized the last shade of the
author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents
which the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss.

Clemens submitted his manuscript to Howells and to Stedman, and he read
portions of it, at least, to Mrs. Clemens, whose eyes were troubling
her so that she could not read for herself. Stedman suggested certain
eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the
book. Howells was enthusiastic. It appealed to him as it had appealed to
Beard. Its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word
that could be said on those subjects. When he had partly finished it he
wrote:

It's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. It
seems that God didn't forget to put a soul in you. He shuts most
literary men off with a brain, merely.

A few days later he wrote again:

The book is glorious-simply noble. What masses of virgin truth
never touched in print before!

And when he had finished it:

Last night I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole
book, it's titanic.

Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells:

I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics,
and I don't care to have them paw the book at all. It's my swan
song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass
to the cemetery unclodded.... Well, my book is written--let
it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so
many things left out. They burn in me; they keep multiplying and
multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would
require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.

In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the
tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote:

When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their
declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing
link: "We hold th