You speak a language which I understand.  I would like to see you.  Could you come and smoke some manilas; I would, of course, say dine, but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but I would have a fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome.

Clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately.  He dined with Bram Stoker, who invited Anthony Hope and one or two others, and with the Chattos and Mr. Percy Spalding; also with Andrew Lang, who wrote, “Your old friend, Lord Lome, wants to see you again”; with the Henry M. Stanleys and Poultney Bigelow, and with Francis H. Skrine, a government official he had met in India.  But in all such affairs he was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the public.  Finally, the new-found cousin, Dr. Jim Clemens, fell ill, and the newspapers had it presently that Mark Twain was lying at the point of death.  A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Tedworth Square with cabled instructions from his paper.  He was a young man, and innocently enough exhibited his credentials.  His orders read: 

“If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words.  If dead, send one thousand.”

Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable.

“You don’t need as much as that,” he said.  “Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.”

The young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was nearly to his office that he saw the joke.  Then, of course, it was flashed all over the world.

Clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very large volume—­larger than he had ever written before.  To MacAlister, April 6, 1897, he wrote, replying to some invitation: 

Ah, but I mustn’t stir from my desk before night now when the publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through.  I am up at work now—­4 o’clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me through.  You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a working-man to strike & go to tea.

    And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli.  When I saw her
    last it was on the street in Homburg, & Susy was walking with me.

On April 13th he makes a note-book entry:  “I finished my book to-day,” and on the 15th he wrote MacAlister, inclosing some bits of manuscript: 

I finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of it—­on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last part is indelicate.  Now, there’s a nice distinction for you—­& correctly stated, too, & perfectly true.

It may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which Mark Twain’s “editor” dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this particular book remain as examples.  That he was not always entirely tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and graciously, is clearly shown.