My dear “Harris”—­No, I mean my dear Joe,—­Just imagine it for a moment:  I was collecting material in Europe during fourteen months for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual presence (not imaginary) in 440 of the 531 pages the book contains!  Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen years to get the material.  You have saved me an intolerable whole world of hated labor, and I’ll not forget it, my boy.

You’ll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and of others that didn’t happen; but you’ll remember the spot where they were invented.  You will see how the imaginary perilous trip up the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded.  That horse-student is on page 192.  The “Fremersberg” is neighboring.  The Black Forest novel is on page 211.  I remember when and where we projected that:  in the leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze beyond the gorge of Allerheiligen.  There’s the “new member,” page 213; the dentist yarn, 223; the true Chamois, 242; at page 248 is a pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom I had forgotten; at 281 is “Harris,” and should have been so entitled, but Bliss has made a mistake and turned you into some other character; 305 brings back the whole Rigi tramp to me at a glance; at 185 and 186 are specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which I made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an equally familiar one.  This fine work being worthy of Titian, I have shed the credit of it upon him.  Well, you’ll find more reminders of things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been printed, in many books.

All the “legends of the Neckar,” which I invented for that unstoried
region, are here; one is in the Appendix.  The steel portrait of me
is just about perfect.

We had a mighty good time, Joe, and the six weeks I would dearly
like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never. 
With love,

                                                Yours, mark.

Hartford, March 16, 1880.

Possibly Twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public generally was a great comfort.  When the Howells letter was read to him he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent forward—­a favorite attitude—­repeating at intervals: 

“Howells said that, did he?  Old Howells said that!”

There have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary merits of ‘A Tramp Abroad’.  Human tastes differ, and a “mixed” book of this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters.  The word “uneven” pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special application to this one.  Written under great stress and uncertainty of mind, it could hardly be uniform.  It presents Mark Twain at his best, and at his worst.  Almost any American writer was better than Mark Twain at his worst:  Mark Twain at his best was unapproachable.