I have a handsome success in one way here.  I left New York under a sort of half-promise to furnish to the Harper magazines 30,000 words this year.  Magazining is difficult work because every third page represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article & are willing to let it go to print it represents only 10 cents a word instead of 30.

But this time I had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start right in each case.  I turned out 37,000 words in 25 working days; & the reason I think I started right every time is, that not only have I approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort (Livy) has done the same.

On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle & not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I am dead.  I shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of the year I expect to put in on a couple of long books (half- completed ones).  No more magazine work hanging over my head.

This secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this enchanting view of Florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that frame it, are the right conditions for work.  They are a persistent inspiration.  To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them divine—­or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest.  On this (second) floor Clara’s room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that.  I go in from time to time every day & trade sass for a look.  The central detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun- polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in Switzerland in the days of our youth.

From this letter, which is of January 7, 1904, we gather that the weather had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens’s health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in December.  One of the stories he had finished was “The $30,000 Bequest.”  The work mentioned, which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as the mood seized him.

He experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with Redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking.  He dictated some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued.

Among these notes there is one elaborate description of the Villa di Quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not surprised to find he had become much attached to the place.  The Italian spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his surroundings.  Some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us here: