States and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be.  He agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability.  At the same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according to Clemens’s intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom.  The exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served our purpose in other ways.  Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way.

We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things out.  It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement.  The characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make them more like his than, if possible, he could.  Several years after, when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes.  We would work all day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read them over to each other.  No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart.  I still believe that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house before them for an indefinite succession of nights.  But this may be my fondness.

At any rate, it was not to be.  Raymond had identified himself with Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds.  But before this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play.  He first offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give it back with the despairing renunciation, “That is a Raymond play.”  We tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could get Raymond to do it.  In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with a play for the winter—­a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in no hurry for ours.  Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew when