I have been delighting my soul for two weeks over a bran new and ingenious way of beginning a novel—­and behold, all at once it flashes upon me that Charley Warner originated the idea 3 years ago and told me about it!  Aha!  So much for self-righteousness!  I am well repaid.  Here are 108 pages of Ms, new and clean, lying disgraced in the waste paper basket, and I am beginning the novel over again in an unstolen way.  I would not wonder if I am the worst literary thief in the world, without knowing it.

It is glorious news that you like Tom Sawyer so well.  I mean to see to it that your review of it shall have plenty of time to appear before the other notices.  Mrs. Clemens decides with you that the book should issue as a book for boys, pure and simple—­and so do I. It is surely the correct idea.  As to that last chapter, I think of just leaving it off and adding nothing in its place.  Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point—­and so the strong temptation to put Huck’s life at the Widow’s into detail, instead of generalizing it in a paragraph was resisted.  Just send Sawyer to me by express—­I enclose money for it.  If it should get lost it will be no great matter.

Company interfered last night, and so “Private Theatricals” goes over till this evening, to be read aloud.  Mrs. Clemens is mad, but the story will take that all out.  This is going to be a splendid winter night for fireside reading, anyway.

I am almost at a dead stand-still with my new story, on account of the
misery of having to do it all over again.  We—­all send love to you—­all. 
                              Yrs ever
          
                              Mark.

The “story” referred to may have been any one of several begun by him at this time.  His head was full of ideas for literature of every sort.  Many of his beginnings came to nothing, for the reason that he started wrong, or with no definitely formed plan.  Others of his literary enterprises were condemned by his wife for their grotesqueness or for the offense they might give in one way or another, however worthy the intention behind them.  Once he wrote a burlesque on family history “The Autobiography of a Damned Fool.”  “Livy wouldn’t have it,” he said later, “so I gave it up.”  The world is indebted to Mark Twain’s wife for the check she put upon his fantastic or violent impulses.  She was his public, his best public—­clearheaded and wise.  That he realized this, and was willing to yield, was by no means the least of his good fortunes.  We may believe that he did not always yield easily, and perhaps sometimes only out of love for her.  In the letter which he wrote her on her thirtieth birthday we realize something of what she had come to mean in his life.

To Mrs. Clemens on her Thirtieth Birthday: