The house is full of carpenters and decorators; whereas, what we really need here, is an incendiary.  If the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph.  And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for these privileges, and never house-keep any more.

I think my wife would be twice as strong as she is, but for this wearing and wearying slavery of house-keeping.  However, she thinks she must submit to it for the sake of the children; whereas, I have always had a tenderness for parents too, so, for her sake and mine, I sigh for the incendiary.  When the evening comes and the gas is lit and the wear and tear of life ceases, we want to keep house always; but next morning we wish, once more, that we were free and irresponsible boarders.

Work?—­one can’t you know, to any purpose.  I don’t really get anything done worth speaking of, except during the three or four months that we are away in the Summer.  I wish the Summer were seven years long.  I keep three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one of them at home.  Yes, and it is all because my time is taken up with answering the letters of strangers.  It can’t be done through a short hand amanuensis—­I’ve tried that—­it wouldn’t work —­I couldn’t learn to dictate.  What does possess strangers to write so many letters?  I never could find that out.  However, I suppose I did it myself when I was a stranger.  But I will never do it again.

Maybe you think I am not happy? the very thing that gravels me is that I
am.  I don’t want to be happy when I can’t work; I am resolved that
hereafter I won’t be.  What I have always longed for, was the privilege
of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich
Islands overlooking the sea. 
                              Yours ever
          
                              Mark.

That magazine article of yours was mighty good:  up to your very best I think.  I enclose a book review written by Howells.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, Oct. 26 ’81.  My dear Howells,—­I am delighted with your review, and so is Mrs. Clemens.  What you have said, there, will convince anybody that reads it; a body cannot help being convinced by it.  That is the kind of a review to have; the doubtful man; even the prejudiced man, is persuaded and succumbs.

What a queer blunder that was, about the baronet.  I can’t quite see how I ever made it.  There was an opulent abundance of things I didn’t know; and consequently no need to trench upon the vest-pocketful of things I did know, to get material for a blunder.