I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last winter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, and pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn’t afford any more.  I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats.

    I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying
    remarks, to see how the thing would go.  I was charmed.

    Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line.  We should have
    some fun.

Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had a distaste for platforming—­had given it up, as he thought, for life.  So Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the larger comfort.  The children were at an age “to be entertaining, and to be entertained.”  In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion when he did not care to write.  They had learned his gift as a romancer, and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked.  They sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects.  They would bring him a picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment’s delay.  Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale.  If they heard the name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as impromptu inspiration.  Once he was suddenly required to make a story out of a plumber and a “bawgunstrictor,” but he was equal to it.  On one side of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were numerous ornaments and pictures.  At one end was the head of a girl, that they called “Emeline,” and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat.  When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with “Emeline.”  This was the unvarying program.  He was not allowed to begin with “Emeline” and end with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any other portion of the room.  He could vary the story as much as he liked.  In fact, he was required to do that.  The trend of its chapters, from the cat to “Emeline,” was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way.

He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock the balls about for inspiration.