The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house once more in the hands of the architect and builders.  It was costing a vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land.  Mrs. Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own right, while her husband’s books and lectures had been highly remunerative, and would be more so.  They were justified in living in ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they could have lived for the rest of their days!

Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown: 

Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce him and prove him.  In my opinion he don’t exist.  I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago, and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her.  She has made a very creditable job of me.

Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed.  Every mail brought great bundles of letters that sang his praises.  Robert Watt, who had translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among his people.  Madame Blanc (Th.  Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended comment on the author and his work, in the ‘Revue des deux mondes’, was said to be preparing a review of ‘The Gilded Age’.  All the world seemed ready to do him honor.

Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one.  Bores stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories.  Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of the press.  Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name.  Trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his daily mail.  Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he prepared a “form” letter of reply: 

Dear sir or madam,—­Experience has not taught me very much, still it has taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy admires—­you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he admires you for your sound judgment.

Yours truly, S. L. C.

Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts and proposals of schemes.  Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises before the first eggs were hatched.  Orion Clemens was as delightful a character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial now and then to Mark Twain.  We may gather something of this from a letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period: