I would dearly like to see it in the Atlantic, but I doubt if it would pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it.  Bret Harte has sold his novel (same size as mine, I should say) to Scribner’s Monthly for $6,500 (publication to begin in September, I think,) and he gets a royalty of 7 1/2 per cent from Bliss in book form afterwards.  He gets a royalty of ten per cent on it in England (issued in serial numbers) and the same royalty on it in book form afterwards, and is to receive an advance payment of five hundred pounds the day the first No. of the serial appears.  If I could do as well, here, and there, with mine, it might possibly pay me, but I seriously doubt it though it is likely I could do better in England than Bret, who is not widely known there.

You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things—­but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly.

By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him on through life (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer—­he would not be a good character for it.

I wish you would promise to read the Ms of Tom Sawyer some time, and see if you don’t really decide that I am right in closing with him as a boy —­and point out the most glaring defects for me.  It is a tremendous favor to ask, and I expect you to refuse and would be ashamed to expect you to do otherwise.  But the thing has been so many months in my mind that it seems a relief to snake it out.  I don’t know any other person whose judgment I could venture to take fully and entirely.  Don’t hesitate about saying no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need to blush if you said yes.

Osgood and I are “going for” the puppy G——­ on infringement of trademark.  To win one or two suits of this kind will set literary folks on a firmer bottom.  I wish Osgood would sue for stealing Holmes’s poem.  Wouldn’t it be gorgeous to sue R——­ for petty larceny?  I will promise to go into court and swear I think him capable of stealing pea-nuts from a blind pedlar. 
                         Yrs ever,
                                   Clemens.

Of course Howells promptly replied that he would read the story, adding:  “You’ve no idea what I may ask you to do for me, some day.  I’m sorry that you can’t do it for the Atlantic, but I succumb.  Perhaps you will do Boy No. 2 for us.”  Clemens, conscience-stricken, meantime, hastily put the Ms. out of reach of temptation.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

July 13, 1875 my dear Howells,—­Just as soon as you consented I realized all the atrocity of my request, and straightway blushed and weakened.  I telegraphed my theatrical agent to come here and carry off the Ms and copy it.