An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night, in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the Sultan to death.  That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed to him that he was “made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from Scheherazade’s prolixity.”

“On the whole,” he said, “it is not your best, nor your second best; but all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can’t afford to indulge in.”

And that was the truth.  So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to seclusion, and there remains to this day.

Clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary, but historical, due to his familiarity with English dates.  He wrote Twichell: 

Day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, I left the study, but I couldn’t hold in—­had to do something; so I spent eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of the English kings on the roads in these grounds, from William the Conqueror to 1883, calculating to invent an open-air game which shall fill the children’s heads with dates without study.  I give each king’s reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the children call the stake by the king’s name.  You can stand in the door and take a bird’s-eye view of English monarchy, from the Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird’s-eye view the rest of it to 1883.

You can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the varying distances of the stakes apart.  You can see Richard II., two feet; Oliver Cromwell, two feet; James II., three feet, and so on —­and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty, fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (Elizabeth, Victoria, Edward III., Henry III., and George III.).  By the way, third’s a lucky number for length of days, isn’t it?  Yes, sir; by my scheme you get a realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns.

The reason it took me eight hours was because, with little Jean’s interrupting assistance, I had to measure from the Conquest to the end of Henry VI. three times over, and besides I had to whittle out all those pegs.

I did a full day’s work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of my game after I went to bed trying to fit it for indoors.  So I didn’t get to sleep till pretty late; but when I did go off I had contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board.

We may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a fair start like that.  He decided to save the human race that year with a history game.