You can’t imagine how brilliant and beautiful that new brass fender is, and how perfectly naturally it takes its place under the carved oak.  How they did scour it up before they sent it!  I lied a good deal about it when I came home—­so for once I kept a secret and surprised Livy on a Christmas morning!

I haven’t done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner; have only moped around.  But I’m going to try tomorrow.  How could I ever have.

Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool.  But then I am God’s fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.

Livy and I join in the warmest regards to you and yours,
                                        Yrs ever,
          
                                        Mark.

Longfellow, in his reply, said:  “I do not believe anybody was much hurt.  Certainly I was not, and Holmes tells me he was not.  So I think you may dismiss the matter from your mind without further remorse.”

Holmes wrote:  “It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or feel wounded by your playful use of my name.”

Miss Ellen Emerson replied for her father (in a letter to Mrs. Clemens) that the speech had made no impression upon him, giving at considerable length the impression it had made on herself and other members of the family.

     Clearly, it was not the principals who were hurt, but only those who
     held them in awe, though one can realize that this would not make it
     much easier for Mark Twain.

XVIII.

Letters from Europe, 1878-79.  Tramping with Twichell.  Writing A new travel book.  Life in Munich

Whether the unhappy occurrence at the Whittier dinner had anything to do with Mark Twain’s resolve to spend a year or two in Europe cannot be known now.  There were other good reasons for going, one in particular being a demand for another book of travel.  It was also true, as he explains in a letter to his mother, that his days were full of annoyances, making it difficult for him to work.  He had a tendency to invest money in almost any glittering enterprise that came along, and at this time he was involved in the promotion of a variety of patent rights that brought him no return other than assessment and vexation.

Clemens’s mother was by this time living with her son Onion and his
wife, in Iowa.

To Mrs. Jane Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa: 

Hartford, Feb. 17, 1878 My dear mother,—­I suppose I am the worst correspondent in the whole world; and yet I grow worse and worse all the time.  My conscience blisters me for not writing you, but it has ceased to abuse me for not writing other folks.