I can’t “encourage” Orion.  Nobody can do that conscientiously, for the reason that before one’s letter has time to reach him he is off on some new wild-goose chase.  Would you encourage in literature a man who the older he grows the worse he writes?

    I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
    his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
    under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.

I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary average.  He says he did well in Hannibal!  Now there is a man who ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and activities of a hen farm.

If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that.  I can do it every day and all day long.  But one can’t “encourage” quicksilver; because the instant you put your finger on it, it isn’t there.  No, I am saying too much.  He does stick to his literary and legal aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for.  If I ever become able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the fact that it is a pension.

    He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
    until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
    it.

Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will longest preserve his memory, ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’.  The success of ‘Roughing It’ naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal —­his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and the rest.  He had recognized these things as material—­inviting material it was—­and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin the fabric of youth.

He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring a study—­a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house —­overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below.  Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days.  To Twichell, of his new retreat, Clemens wrote: 

It is the loveliest study you ever saw.  It is octagonal, with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.  It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.