I brought Mrs. Clemens back from her trip in a dreadfully broken-down condition—­so by the doctor’s orders we unpacked the trunks sorrowfully to lie idle here another month instead of going at once to Hartford and proceeding to furnish the new house which is now finished.  We hate to have it go longer desolate and tenantless, but cannot help it.

By and by, if the madam gets strong again, we are hoping to have the
Grays there, and you and the Aldrich households, and Osgood, down to
engage in an orgy with them. 
                              Ys Ever
                                        Mark

Howells was editor of the Atlantic by this time, and had been urging Clemens to write something suitable for that magazine.  He had done nothing, however, until this summer at Quarry Farm.  There, one night in the moonlight, Mrs. Crane’s colored cook, who had been a slave, was induced to tell him her story.  It was exactly the story to appeal to Mark Twain, and the kind of thing he could write.  He set it down next morning, as nearly in her own words and manner as possible, without departing too far from literary requirements.

He decided to send this to Howells.  He did not regard it very highly, but he would take the chance.  An earlier offering to the magazine had been returned.  He sent the “True Story,” with a brief note: 

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Elmira, Sept. 2, ’74. 
My dear Howells,--.....I enclose also a “True Story” which has no humor
in it.   You can pay as lightly as you choose for that, if you want it,
for it is rather out of my line.   I have not altered the old colored
woman’s story except to begin at the beginning, instead of the middle, as
she did--and traveled both ways..... 
Yrs Ever
Mark.

     But Howells was delighted with it.  He referred to its “realest kind
     of black talk,” and in another place added, “This little story
     delights me more and more.  I wish you had about forty of them.”

Along with the “True Story” Mark Twain had sent the “Fable for Good Old Boys and Girls”; but this Howells returned, not, as he said, because he didn’t like it, but because the Atlantic on matters of religion was just in that “Good Lord, Good Devil condition when a little fable like yours wouldn’t leave it a single Presbyterian, Baptist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, Methodist, or Millerite paying subscriber, while all the deadheads would stick to it and abuse it in the denominational newspapers!”

But the shorter Ms. had been only a brief diversion.  Mark Twain was bowling along at a book and a play.  The book was Tom Sawyer, as already mentioned, and the play a dramatization from The Gilded Age.  Clemens had all along intended to dramatize the story of Colonel Sellers, and was one day thunderstruck to receive word from California that a San Francisco dramatist