enough, and sufficient profit east of the Mississippi.  Boston was often their headquarters that winter (’69 and ’70), and they were much together.  “Josh Billings,” another of Redpath’s lecturers, was likewise often to be found in the Lyceum offices.  There is a photograph of Mark Twain, Nasby, and Josh Billings together.

Clemens also, that winter, met William Dean Howells, then in the early days of his association with the Atlantic Monthly.  The two men, so widely different, became firm friends at sight, and it was to Howells in the years to come that Mark Twain would write more letters, and more characteristic letters, than to any other living man.  Howells had favorably reviewed ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ and after the first moment of their introduction had passed Clemens said:  “When I read that review of yours I felt like the woman who said that she was so glad that her baby had come white.”  It was not the sort of thing that Howells would have said, but it was the sort of thing that he could understand and appreciate from Mark Twain.

In company with Nasby Clemens, that season, also met Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Later he had sent Holmes a copy of his book and received a pleasantly appreciative reply.  “I always like,” wrote Holmes, “to hear what one of my fellow countrymen, who is not a Hebrew scholar, or a reader of hiero-glyphics, but a good-humored traveler with a pair of sharp, twinkling Yankee (in the broader sense) eyes in his head, has to say about the things that learned travelers often make unintelligible, and sentimental ones ridiculous or absurd ....  I hope your booksellers will sell a hundred thousand copies of your travels.”  A wish that was realized in due time, though it is doubtful if Doctor Holmes or any one else at the moment believed that a book of that nature and price (it was $3.50 a copy) would ever reach such a sale.

To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis: 

Boston, Nov. 9, 1869.  My dear sister,—­Three or four letters just received from home.  My first impulse was to send Orion a check on my publisher for the money he wants, but a sober second thought suggested that if he has not defrauded the government out of money, why pay, simply because the government chooses to consider him in its debt?  No:  Right is right.  The idea don’t suit me.  Let him write the Treasury the state of the case, and tell them he has no money.  If they make his sureties pay, then I will make the sureties whole, but I won’t pay a cent of an unjust claim.  You talk of disgrace.  To my mind it would be just as disgraceful to allow one’s self to be bullied into paying that which is unjust.

Ma thinks it is hard that Orion’s share of the land should be swept away just as it is right on the point (as it always has been) of becoming valuable.  Let her rest easy on that point.  This letter is his ample authority to sell my share of the land immediately and appropriate the proceeds—­giving no account to me, but repaying the amount to Ma first, or in case of her death, to you or your heirs, whenever in the future he shall be able to do it.  Now, I want no hesitation in this matter.  I renounce my ownership from this date, for this purpose, provided it is sold just as suddenly as he can sell it.