“His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat turnips.”

The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he wrote: 

Mark,—­You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming.  I never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the inspiration of genius.  If you will really betake yourself to farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what you don’t know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging criticism, but will give you my blessing.

Yours, Horace Greeley.

The letter is in Mr. Greeley’s characteristic scrawl, and no doubt furnished inspiration for the turnip story in ‘Roughing It’, also the model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley’s writing.

Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm.  By the middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day.  He was in high spirits by this time.  The family health had improved, and prospects were bright.

I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings) about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done.  I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing I have not experienced for months) that I can’t bear to lose a single moment of the inspiration.  So I will stay here and peg away as long as it lasts.  My present idea is to write as much more as I have already written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and discard the rest.  When I get it done I want to see the man who will begin to read it and not finish it.  Nothing grieves me now; nothing troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention.  I don’t think of anything but the book, and don’t have an hour’s unhappiness about anything, and don’t care two cents whether school keeps or not.  The book will be done soon now.  It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be worth the price of the volume.  Thus: 

To the late Cain
this book is dedicated

not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent insanity plea.

Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the literary tribute to Cain.  The impulse that inspired it, however, was characteristic.