Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands.  He is a marvelous talker on a deep subject.  I do not see how even Spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in a cleaner, clearer, crisper English.  He astounded Twichell with his faculty.  You know when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the Apostles were mere policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the Summerset Club; Osgood, full, Boyle O’Reilly, full, Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the floor, and properly fortified.  Cable told Mrs. Clemens when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a cattle-car.  It was a very large time.  He called it an orgy.  And no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.

I wish I were in Switzerland, and I wish we could go to Florence; but we
have to leave these delights to you; there is no helping it.  We all join
in love to you and all the family. 
                                   Yours as ever
          
                                   Mark.

XXIII.

Letters, 1883, to Howells and others.  A guest of the Marquis of Lorne.  The history game.  A play by Howells and Mark twain

Mark Twain, in due season, finished the Mississippi book and placed it in Osgood’s hands for publication.  It was a sort of partnership arrangement in which Clemens was to furnish the money to make the book, and pay Osgood a percentage for handling it.  It was, in fact, the beginning of Mark Twain’s adventures as a publisher.

Howells was not as happy in Florence as he had hoped to be.  The social life there overwhelmed him.  In February he wrote:  “Our two months in Florence have been the most ridiculous time that ever even half-witted people passed.  We have spent them in chasing round after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them.  My story isn’t finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the fatal marks of haste and distraction.  Of course, I haven’t put pen to paper yet on the play.  I wring my hands and beat my breast when I think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how I have been forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which I couldn’t escape.”

Clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation.  Howells’s story of this time was “A Woman’s Reason.”  Governor Jewell, of this letter, was Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut from 1871 to 1873.  Later, he was Minister to Russia, and in 1874 was United States Postmaster-General.

To W. D. Howells, in Florence: