manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. I
intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take
it along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a
thing I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a
single moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as
long as it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have
already written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters
and discard the rest. When I get it done I want to see the man who will
begin to read it and not finish it. Nothing grieves me now; nothing
troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention. I don't think
of anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about
anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not. The book
will be done soon now. It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be
worth the price of the volume. Thus:

TO THE LATE CAIN
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but
out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
insanity plea.

Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of
the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that inspired it, however, was
characteristic.

In a postscript to this letter he adds:

My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books
and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.

He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to the
California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to
be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the "Arkansas"
incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wro