than any other kind of warning would.  Where in the nation can I get that portrait?  Here are heaps of people that want it,—­that need it.  There is my uncle.  He wants a copy.  He is lying at the point of death.  He has been lying at the point of death for two years.  He wants a copy—­and I want him to have a copy.  And I want you to send a copy to the man that shot my dog.  I want to see if he is dead to every human instinct.

Now you send me that portrait.  I am sending you mine, in this letter; and am glad to do it, for it has been greatly admired.  People who are judges of art, find in the execution a grandeur which has not been equalled in this country, and an expression which has not been approached in any. 
                                   Yrs truly,
                                             S. L. Clemens.

P. S. 62,000 copies of “Roughing It” sold and delivered in 4 months.

The Clemens family did not spend the summer at Quarry Farm that year.  The sea air was prescribed for Mrs. Clemens and the baby, and they went to Saybrook, Connecticut, to Fenwick Hall.  Clemens wrote very little, though he seems to have planned Tom Sawyer, and perhaps made its earliest beginning, which was in dramatic form.

His mind, however, was otherwise active.  He was always more or less
given to inventions, and in his next letter we find a description of
one which he brought to comparative perfection.

He had also conceived the idea of another book of travel, and this
was his purpose of a projected trip to England.

To Orion Clemens, in Hartford: 

Fenwickhall, Saybrook, Conn. 
Aug. 11, 1872. 
My dear Bro.—­I shall sail for England in the Scotia, Aug. 21.

But what I wish to put on record now, is my new invention—­hence this note, which you will preserve.  It is this—­a self-pasting scrap-book —­good enough idea if some juggling tailor does not come along and ante-date me a couple of months, as in the case of the elastic veststrap.

The nuisance of keeping a scrap-book is:  1.  One never has paste or gum tragacanth handy; 2.  Mucilage won’t stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3.  Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4.  To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome.  My idea is this:  Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps.

Lay on the gum in columns of stripes.

Each stripe of gum the length of say 20 ems, small pica, and as broad as your finger; a blank about as broad as your finger between each 2 stripes—­so in wetting the paper you need not wet any more of the gum than your scrap or scraps will cover—­then you may shut up the book and the leaves won’t stick together.