of this people and the Sabbath repose of this land.”  “What an imperishable sketch Howells would make of Capt.  West the whaler, and Capt.  Hope with the patient, pathetic face, wanderer in all the oceans for 42 years, lucky in none; coming home defeated once more, now, minus his ship —­resigned, uncomplaining, being used to this.”  “What a rattling chapter Howells would make out of the small boy Alfred, with his alert eye and military brevity and exactness of speech; and out of the old landlady; and her sacred onions; and her daughter; and the visiting clergyman; and the ancient pianos of Hamilton and the venerable music in vogue there —­and forty other things which we shall leave untouched or touched but lightly upon, we not being worthy.”  “Dam Howells for not being here!” (this usually from me, not Twichell.)

O, your insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day!  If you had gone with us and let me pay the $50 which the trip and the board and the various nicknacks and mementoes would cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written, whereas I can now write only one or two and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways.  Ponder these things.  Lord, what a perfectly bewitching excursion it was!  I traveled under an assumed name and was never molested with a polite attention from anybody. 
                         Love to you all. 
                                        Yrs ever
          
                                        Mark

Aldrich, meantime, had invited the Clemenses to Ponkapog during the
Bermuda absence, and Clemens hastened to send him a line expressing
regrets.  At the close he said: 

To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.: 

Farmington Avenue, Hartford, June 3, 1877.  Day after tomorrow we leave for the hills beyond Elmira, N. Y. for the summer, when I shall hope to write a book of some sort or other to beat the people with.  A work similar to your new one in the Atlantic is what I mean, though I have not heard what the nature of that one is.  Immoral, I suppose.  Well, you are right.  Such books sell best, Howells says.  Howells says he is going to make his next book indelicate.  He says he thinks there is money in it.  He says there is a large class of the young, in schools and seminaries who—­But you let him tell you.  He has ciphered it all down to a demonstration.

With the warmest remembrances to the pair of you
                                   Ever Yours
                                        Samuel L. Clemens.

Clemens would naturally write something about Bermuda, and began at once, “Random Notes of an Idle Excursion,” and presently completed four papers, which Howells eagerly accepted for the Atlantic.  Then we find him plunging into another play, this time alone.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: