Farmington Avenue, Hartford, Sept. 20, 1876.  My dear Howells,—­All right, my boy, send proof sheets here.  I amend dialect stuff by talking and talking and talking it till it sounds right —­and I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says “goin” and sometimes “gwyne,” and they make just such discrepancies in other words—­and when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s carelessness.  But I want to work at the proofs and get the dialect as nearly right as possible.

We are in part of the new house.  Goodness knows when we’ll get in the rest of it—­full of workmen yet.

I worked a month at my play, and launched it in New York last Wednesday.  I believe it will go.  The newspapers have been complimentary.  It is simply a setting for the one character, Col.  Sellers—­as a play I guess it will not bear a critical assault in force.

The Warners are as charming as ever.  They go shortly to the devil for a year—­(which is but a poetical way of saying they are going to afflict themselves with the unsurpassable—­(bad word) of travel for a spell.) I believe they mean to go and see you, first-so they mean to start from heaven to the other place; not from earth.  How is that?

I think that is no slouch of a compliment—­kind of a dim religious light
about it.  I enjoy that sort of thing. 
                                   Yrs ever
          
                                   Mark.

Raymond, in a letter to the Sun, stated that not “one line” of the California dramatization had been used by Mark Twain, “except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.”  Clemens himself, in a statement that he wrote for the Hartford Post, but suppressed, probably at the request of his wife, gave a full history of the play’s origin, a matter of slight interest to-day.

Sellers on the stage proved a great success.  The play had no special merit as a literary composition, but the character of Sellers delighted the public, and both author and actor were richly repaid for their entertainment.

XIV.

Letters 1874.  Mississippi chapters.  Visits to Boston.  A joke on Aldrich

“Couldn’t you send me some such story as that colored one for our January number—­that is, within a month?” wrote Howells, at the end of September, and during the week following Mark Twain struggled hard to comply, but without result.  When the month was nearly up he wrote: 

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, Oct. 23, 1874. 
My dear Howells,—­I have delayed thus long, hoping I might do something for the January number and Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to go to work and do that something, but it’s no use —­I find I can’t.  We are in such a state of weary and endless confusion that my head won’t go.  So I give it up..... 
Yrs ever,
Mark.