Onion Clemens, meantime, was forwarding his manuscript, and for once seems to have won his brother’s approval, so much so that Mark Twain was willing, indeed anxious, that Howells should run the “autobiography” in the Atlantic.  We may imagine how Onion prized the words of commendation which follow: 

To Orion Clemens: 

May 6, ’80. 
My dear brother,—­It is a model autobiography.

Continue to develop your character in the same gradual inconspicuous and apparently unconscious way.  The reader, up to this time, may have his doubts, perhaps, but he can’t say decidedly, “This writer is not such a simpleton as he has been letting on to be.”  Keep him in that state of mind.  If, when you shall have finished, the reader shall say, “The man is an ass, but I really don’t know whether he knows it or not,” your work will be a triumph.

Stop re-writing.  I saw places in your last batch where re-writing had done formidable injury.  Do not try to find those places, else you will mar them further by trying to better them.  It is perilous to revise a book while it is under way.  All of us have injured our books in that foolish way.

Keep in mind what I told you—­when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are.  Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.

I have penciled the Ms here and there, but have not needed to make any criticisms or to knock out anything.

The elder Bliss has heart disease badly, and thenceforth his life hangs
upon a thread. 
                              Yr Bro
                                        Sam.

But Howells could not bring himself to print so frank a confession as Orion had been willing to make.  “It wrung my heart,” he said, “and I felt haggard after I had finished it.  The writer’s soul is laid bare; it is shocking.”  Howells added that the best touches in it were those which made one acquainted with the writer’s brother; that is to say, Mark Twain, and that these would prove valuable material hereafter—­a true prophecy, for Mark Twain’s early biography would have lacked most of its vital incident, and at least half of its background, without those faithful chapters, fortunately preserved.  Had Onion continued, as he began, the work might have proved an important contribution to literature, but he went trailing off into by-paths of theology and discussion where the interest was lost.  There were, perhaps, as many as two thousand pages of it, which few could undertake to read.

Mark Twain’s mind was always busy with plans and inventions, many of them of serious intent, some semi-serious, others of a purely whimsical character.  Once he proposed a “Modest Club,” of which the first and main qualification for membership was modesty.  “At present,” he wrote, “I