My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them.  I have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people.  And I have begun a story.  Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature:  that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it.  I start Bill Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival of the missionaries and—­the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism.

    Then these two will become educated Christians and highly civilized.

    And then I will jump fifteen years and do Ragsdale’s leper business. 
    When we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the
    story, all ready to our hand.

He made elaborate preparations for the Sandwich Islands story, which he and Howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he actually did dramatize ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’, and was prodding Webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares unsuited to their needs.  Mark Twain was one of the most dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement of the dramatic idea.  It is one of the commonest defects in the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain.

The winter of 1883-84 was a gay one in the Clemens home.  Henry Irving was among those entertained, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Aldrich and his wife, Howells of course, and George W. Cable.  Cable had now permanently left the South for the promised land which all authors of the South and West seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to Hartford.  Clemens took Cable’s fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another, invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the American Publishing Company, of which Frank Bliss was now the manager, for the improvement of his fortunes.

Cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked up the measles.  He suddenly came down with the complaint during his visit to Clemens, and his case was a violent one.  It required the constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the household to pull him through.