Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let me stay at home and blush.

Yours truly, mark.

The play was equally successful wherever it went.  It made what in that day was regarded as a fortune.  One hundred thousand dollars is hardly too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.  Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way.  The finer side, the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.  Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created a much greater part than Mark Twain had written.  Doubtless from the point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was naturally obnoxious to Clemens.  In course of time their personal relations ceased.

Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley.  In reply to an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven there by lack of bread.  But he added: 

By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack of bread-among Father Hawley’s flock.

He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is a sample: 

I don’t see any use in spelling a word right—­and never did.  I mean I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words.  We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike.  Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.  I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me; there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his orthography.  He always spells “kow” with a large “K.”  Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one.  It is better.  It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope.  It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.

He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation, was spelled down on the word “chaldron,” which he spelled “cauldron,” as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as authority gave that form as second choice.

Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a paper on “Universal Suffrage,” which is still remembered by the surviving members of that time.  A paragraph or two will convey its purport: