“Deuced” was not strong enough; so I met you halfway with “devilish.”

Mrs. Clemens has returned from New York with dreadful sore throat, and
bones racked with rheumatism.  She keeps her bed.  “Aloha nui!” as the
Kanakas say. 
                         Mark.

     Henry Irving once said to Mark Twain:  “You made a mistake by not
     adopting the stage as a profession.  You would have made even a
     greater actor than a writer.”

Mark Twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very tractable one.  His appearance in Hartford in “The Loan of a Lover” was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed Peter Spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their cues, and nearly broke up the performance.  It was, of course, an amateur benefit, though Augustin Daly promptly wrote, offering to put it on for a long run.

The “skeleton novelette” mentioned in the next letter refers to a plan concocted by Howells and Clemens, by which each of twelve authors was to write a story, using the same plot, “blindfolded” as to what the others had written.  It was a regular “Mark Twain” notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine Howells’s continued enthusiasm in it.  Neither he nor Clemens gave up the idea for a long time.  It appears in their letters again and again, though perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Apl. 22, 1876.  My dear Howells, You’ll see per enclosed slip that I appear for the first time on the stage next Wednesday.  You and Mrs. H. come down and you shall skip in free.

I wrote my skeleton novelette yesterday and today.  It will make a little under 12 pages.

Please tell Aldrich I’ve got a photographer engaged, and tri-weekly issue
is about to begin.  Show him the canvassing specimens and beseech him to
subscribe. 
                    Ever yours,
                              S. L. C.

In his next letter Mark Twain explains why Tom Sawyer is not to appear as soon as planned.  The reference to “The Literary Nightmare” refers to the “Punch, Conductor, Punch with Care” sketch, which had recently appeared in the Atlantic.  Many other versifiers had had their turn at horse-car poetry, and now a publisher was anxious to collect it in a book, provided he could use the Atlantic sketch.  Clemens does not tell us here the nature of Carlton’s insult, forgiveness of which he was not yet qualified to grant, but there are at least two stories about it, or two halves of the same incident, as related afterward by Clemens and Canton.  Clemens said that when he took the Jumping Frog book to Carlton, in 1867, the latter, pointing to his stock, said, rather scornfully:  “Books?  I don’t want your book; my shelves are full of