Of course the thing is perfect, in the magazine, without the train-boy; but I was thinking of the stage and the groundlings.  If the dainty touches went over their heads, the train-boy and other possible interruptions would fetch them every time.  Would it mar the flow of the thing too much to insert that devil?  I thought it over a couple of hours and concluded it wouldn’t, and that he ought to be in for the sake of the groundlings (and to get new copyright on the piece.)

And it seemed to me that now that the fourth act is so successfully written, why not go ahead and write the 3 preceding acts?  And then after it is finished, let me put into it a low-comedy character (the girl’s or the lover’s father or uncle) and gobble a big pecuniary interest in your work for myself.  Do not let this generous proposition disturb your rest —­but do write the other 3 acts, and then it will be valuable to managers.  And don’t go and sell it to anybody, like Harte, but keep it for yourself.

Harte’s play can be doctored till it will be entirely acceptable and then
it will clear a great sum every year.  I am out of all patience with
Harte for selling it.  The play entertained me hugely, even in its
present crude state. 
                         Love to you all. 
                                   Yrs ever,
          
                                   Mark

Following the Sellers success, Clemens had made many attempts at dramatic writing.  Such undertakings had uniformly failed, but he had always been willing to try again.  In the next letter we get the beginning of what proved his first and last direct literary association, that is to say, collaboration, with Bret Harte.  Clemens had great admiration for Harte’s ability and believed that between them they could turn out a successful play.  Whether or not this belief was justified will appear later.  Howells’s biography of Hayes, meanwhile, had not gone well.  He reported that only two thousand copies had been sold in what was now the height of the campaign.  “There’s success for you,” he said; “it makes me despair of the Republic.”

Clemens, on his part, had made a speech for Hayes that Howells declared had put civil-service reform in a nutshell; he added:  “You are the only Republican orator, quoted without distinction of party by all the newspapers.”

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, Oct. 11, 1876.  My dear Howells, This is a secret, to be known to nobody but you (of course I comprehend that Mrs. Howells is part of you) that Bret Harte came up here the other day and asked me to help him write a play and divide the swag, and I agreed.  I am to put in Scotty Briggs (See Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral, in “Roughing It.”) and he is to put in a Chinaman (a, wonderfully funny creature, as Bret presents him—­for 5 minutes—­in his Sandy Bar play.) This Chinaman is to be the character of the play, and both of us will work on him and develop him.  Bret is to draw a plot, and I am to do the same; we shall use the best of the two, or gouge from both and build a third.  My plot is built—­finished it yesterday—­six days’ work, 8 or 9 hours a day, and has nearly killed me.