He worked steadily there that summer.  He would go up mornings, after breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o’clock or after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon.  Other members of the family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they blew a horn.  Each evening he brought down his day’s performance to read to the assembled family.  He felt the need of audience and approval.  Usually he earned the latter, but not always.  Once, when for a day he put aside other matters to record a young undertaker’s love-affair, and brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of it, he met with a surprise.  The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort.  No one spoke during the reading, nobody laughed:  The air was thick with disapproval.  His voice lagged and faltered toward the end.  When he finished there was heavy silence.  Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak: 

“Youth, let’s walk a little,” she said.

The “Undertaker’s Love Story” is still among the manuscripts of that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print. —­[This tale bears no relation to “The Undertaker’s Story” in Sketches New and Old.]

The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily.  Clemens wrote Dr. Brown: 

I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing....

    On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
    brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
    same thin linen we make shirts of.

He incloses some photographs in this letter.

The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of the farm-house.  On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her German nurse-maid.  I am sitting behind them.  Mrs. Crane is in the center.  Mr. Crane next to her.  Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.  Her Irish nurse stands at her back.  Then comes the table waitress, a young negro girl, born free.  Next to her is Auntie Cord (a fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine).  She is the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self- satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby’s American nurse-maid.  In the middle distance my mother-in-law’s coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out the picture.  No, that is not true.  He was waiting there a minute or two before the photographer came.  In the extreme background, under the archway, you glimpse my study.

The “new baby,” “Bay,” as they came to call her, was another little daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household.  In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.