Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had come to be rather more seriously regarded.  The article was accepted promptly! —­[The publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as Telepathy.  A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as one of Mark Twain’s jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.] —­The old sketch, “Luck,” also found its way to Harper’s Magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their disposal.  Even the history game was dragged from the dust of its retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit.

Then Mark Twain went to work in earnest.  Within a week after the collapse of the Jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book—­the transmigration of the old “Claimant” play into a novel.

Ever since the appearance of the Yankee there had been what was evidently a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of Henry George as the central idea.  Letters from every direction had urged him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious purpose for the Claimant book.  A motif in which there is a young lord who renounces his heritage and class to come to America and labor with his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by readings of ‘Progress and Poverty’ and ‘Looking Backward’ address their brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while.  Clemens inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and had he developed this element further, and abandoned Colonel Sellers’s materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result might have been more fortunate.

But his faith in the new Sellers had never died, and the temptation to use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be resisted.  The result was incongruous enough.  The author, however, admired it amazingly at the time.  He sent Howells stirring reports of his progress.  He wrote Hall that the book would be ready soon and that there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, “not a single one short of that.”  Then suddenly, at the end of February, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen.  He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five thousand words.

I don’t want to erase any of them.  My right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it-no, I mean 1,000,000—­next fall).  I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don’t have to yell.  I write 2,000 words a day.  I think I can dictate twice as many.

    But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you—­go ahead
    and do it all the same.