comes out more and more frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to move my manuscripts over to my den.  Now the call is loud and decided at last.  So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell; we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I’ll go to work again (perhaps in Munich).

The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when he left Hartford.  Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as possible.  Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a great day for him:  that his third son had been happily born early that morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings.

I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote].  I labor with my felicities.  How I shall get to sleep to-night I don’t know, though I have had a good start, in not having slept much last night.  Oh, my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be?  I do.  To begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth everything.  To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together —­why, it’s my dream of luxury.  Harmony, who at sunrise this morning deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another degree of strength in a minute.  She refused to consider her being left alone; but:  only the great chance opened to me.

    Shoes—­Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon
    your shoes.  Don’t fail to have adequate preparation made in that
    department.

Meantime, the struggle with the “awful German language” went on.  It was a general hand-to-hand contest.  From the head of the household down to little Clara not one was exempt.  To Clemens it became a sort of nightmare.  Once in his note-book he says: 

“Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn’t talk, and wished they had gone to the other place”; and a little farther along, “I wish I could hear myself talk German.”

To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles: 

Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never loses an instant while she is awake—­or asleep, either, for that matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the genitive case and the declensions of the definite article.  Livy is bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, “Oh, there’s no use!  We never can learn it in the world!” Then Livy takes a sentence to go to bed on:  goes gaping and stretching to