In a postscript to this letter he adds: 

My stock is looking up.  I am getting the bulliest offers for books and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length, and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.

He set in to make hay while the sun was shining.  In addition to the California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the “Arkansas” incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several inventions—­an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford; prospected the latter place for a new home.  The shadow which had hung over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.

He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June he sent three sketches.  In an accompanying letter he says: 

Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for the lot.  If you don’t want them I’ll sell them to the Galaxy, but not for a cent less than three times the money....  If you take them pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has received it all.

He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with Redpath for the coming season.  He found himself in a lecture-writing fever.  He wrote three of them in succession:  one on Artemus Ward, another on “Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met,” and a third one based on chapters from the new book.  Of the “Reminiscence” lecture he wrote Redpath: 

“It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all.”  Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another lecture, “title to be announced later.”

“During July I’ll decide which one I like best,” he said.  He instructed Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches.  “I never made a success of a lecture in a church yet.  People are afraid to laugh in a church.”

Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.  Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices that were likely to change overnight.  In August he wrote: 

Dear red,—­I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.  People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.  See?  Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give