Apl 3, ’76.  My dear Howells,—­It is a splendid notice and will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, and will modify or shut up the unfriendly.  To “fear God and dread the Sunday school” exactly described that old feeling which I used to have, but I couldn’t have formulated it.  I want to enclose one of the illustrations in this letter, if I do not forget it.  Of course the book is to be elaborately illustrated, and I think that many of the pictures are considerably above the American average, in conception if not in execution.

I do not re-enclose your review to you, for you have evidently read and corrected it, and so I judge you do not need it.  About two days after the Atlantic issues I mean to begin to send books to principal journals and magazines.

I read the “Carnival of Crime” proof in New York when worn and witless and so left some things unamended which I might possibly have altered had I been at home.  For instance, “I shall always address you in your own S-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g d-r-a-w-l, baby.”  I saw that you objected to something there, but I did not understand what!  Was it that it was too personal?  Should the language be altered?—­or the hyphens taken out?  Won’t you please fix it the way it ought to be, altering the language as you choose, only making it bitter and contemptuous?

“Deuced” was not strong enough; so I met you halfway with “devilish.”

Mrs. Clemens has returned from New York with dreadful sore throat, and
bones racked with rheumatism.  She keeps her bed.  “Aloha nui!” as the
Kanakas say. 
                         Mark.

     Henry Irving once said to Mark Twain:  “You made a mistake by not
     adopting the stage as a profession.  You would have made even a
     greater actor than a writer.”

Mark Twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very tractable one.  His appearance in Hartford in “The Loan of a Lover” was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed Peter Spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their cues, and nearly broke up the performance.  It was, of course, an amateur benefit, though Augustin Daly promptly wrote, offering to put it on for a long run.

The “skeleton novelette” mentioned in the next letter refers to a plan concocted by Howells and Clemens, by which each of twelve authors was to write a story, using the same plot, “blindfolded” as to what the others had written.  It was a regular “Mark Twain” notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine Howells’s continued enthusiasm in it.  Neither he nor Clemens gave up the idea for a long time.  It appears in their letters again and again, though perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: