I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset.  I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households.  I shall have my youngest daughter with me.  The other one will go from the rest- cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we shall not see her before autumn.  We have not seen her since the middle of October.

Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it.  I know the Thayers of old—­manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there.  Mrs. Thayer and I were shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago.

    Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the
    fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit.  I am tired
    wanting for that man to get old.

They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer colony which congregated there.  There was much going to and fro among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comradeship.

The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming outlook.  Clemens wrote to Twichell: 

We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock.  It is a woody solitude.  We have no near neighbors.  We have neighbors and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we live on a hill.  I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years’ friendship.  It is the most remarkable thing I ever heard of.

This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript. .  It was a fantastic tale entitled “3,000 Years among the Microbes,” a sort of scientific revel—­or revelry—­the autobiography of a microbe that had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn him into a bird.  His habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic nations and fantastic life problems.  It was a satire, of course —­Gulliver’s Lilliput outdone—­a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree.

He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had attained the proportions of a book of size.  As a whole it would hardly have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous passages, and certainly not without interest.  Its chief mission was to divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.—­[For extracts from “3,000 Years among the Microbes” see Appendix V, at the end of this work.] Mark Twain’s suggested title-page for his microbe book: