Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens’s sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills.  It was bought quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening, stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements during vacation days.  When the place had first been purchased, they had debated on a name for it.  They had tried several, among them “Go-as-you-please Hall,” “Crane’s Nest,” and had finally agreed upon “Rest and Be Thankful.”  But this was only its official name.  There was an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the title suggested by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue.  The place became Quarry Farm, and so remains.

Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.  They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited them.  Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not—­a home for the literary man.  It held a distinguished group of writers, most of whom the Clemenses already knew.  Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.

Their plans for going were not very definite as to time.  Clemens found that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the delicate baby daily improved.  They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean so much to them in the years to come.

It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh enthusiasm in the new book.  Goodman arrived just when the author’s spirits were at low ebb.

“Joe,” he said, “I guess I’m done for.  I don’t appear to be able to get along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.  I’m afraid I’ll never be able to reach the standard of ’The Innocents Abroad’ again.  Here is what I have written, Joe.  Read it, and see if that is your opinion.”

Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens went over to a table and pretended to work.  Goodman read page after page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it.  Clemens watched him furtively, till he could stand it no longer.  Then he threw down his pen, exclaiming: 

“I knew it!  I knew it!  I am writing nothing but rot.  You have sat there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am making of myself.  But I am not wholly to blame.  I am not strong enough to fight against fate.  I have been trying to write a funny book, with dead people and sickness everywhere.  Mr. Langdon died first, then a young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at the point of death all winter!  Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!”