her in that connection, if you will.  Then she spoke of her plans—­hers, mind you, for I never have anything quite so definite as a plan.  She proposes to stop a fortnight in (confound the place, I’ve forgotten what it was,) then go and live in Dresden till sometime in the summer; then retire to Switzerland for the hottest season, then stay a while in Venice and put in the winter in Munich.  This program subject to modifications according to circumstances.  She said something about some little by-trips here and there, but they didn’t stick in my memory because the idea didn’t charm me.

(They have just telephoned me from the Courant office that Bayard Taylor and family have taken rooms in our ship, the Holsatia, for the 11th April.)

Do come, if you possibly can!—­and remember and don’t forget to avoid
letting Mrs. Clemens find out I lost her letter.  Just answer her the
same as if you had got it. 
                              Sincerely yours
                                             S. L. Clemens.

     The Howellses came, as invited, for a final reunion before the
     breaking up.  This was in the early half of March; the Clemenses
     were to sail on the 11th of the following month.

Orion Clemens, meantime, had conceived a new literary idea and was piling in his Ms. as fast as possible to get his brother’s judgment on it before the sailing-date.  It was not a very good time to send Ms., but Mark Twain seems to have read it and given it some consideration.  “The Journey in Heaven,” of his own, which he mentions, was the story published so many years later under the title of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”  He had began it in 1868, on his voyage to San Francisco, it having been suggested by conversations with Capt.  Ned Wakeman, of one of the Pacific steamers.  Wakeman also appears in ‘Roughing It,’ Chap.  L, as Capt.  Ned Blakely, and again in one of the “Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” as “Captain Hurricane Jones.”

To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk: 

Hartford, Mch. 23, 1878.  My dear Bro.,—­Every man must learn his trade—­not pick it up.  God requires that he learn it by slow and painful processes.  The apprentice-hand, in black-smithing, in medicine, in literature, in everything, is a thing that can’t be hidden.  It always shows.

But happily there is a market for apprentice work, else the “Innocents Abroad” would have had no sale.  Happily, too, there’s a wider market for some sorts of apprentice literature than there is for the very best of journey-work.  This work of yours is exceedingly crude, but I am free to say it is less crude than I expected it to be, and considerably better work than I believed you could do, it is too crude to offer to any prominent periodical, so I shall speak to the N. Y. Weekly people.  To publish it there will be to bury it.  Why could not same good genius have sent me to the N. Y. Weekly with my apprentice sketches?