This mood will pass, some day—­there is history for it.  But it cannot pass until my wife comes up out of the submergence.  She was always so quick to recover herself before, but now there is no rebound, and we are dead people who go through the motions of life.  Indeed I am a mud image, and it will puzzle me to know what it is in me that writes, and has comedy-fancies and finds pleasure in phrasing them.  It is a law of our nature, of course, or it wouldn’t happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud image and goes its own way, wholly unconscious of it and apparently of no kinship with it.  I have finished my book, but I go on as if the end were indefinitely away—­as indeed it is.  There is no hurry—­at any rate there is no limit.

Jean’s spirits are good; Clara’s are rising.  They have youth—­the only thing that was worth giving to the race.

These are sardonic times.  Look at Greece, and that whole shabby muddle.  But I am not sorry to be alive and privileged to look on.  If I were not a hermit I would go to the House every day and see those people scuffle over it and blether about the brotherhood of the human race.  This has been a bitter year for English pride, and I don’t like to see England humbled—­that is, not too much.  We are sprung from her loins, and it hurts me.  I am for republics, and she is the only comrade we’ve got, in that.  We can’t count France, and there is hardly enough of Switzerland to count.  Beneath the governing crust England is sound-hearted—­and sincere, too, and nearly straight.  But I am appalled to notice that the wide extension of the surface has damaged her manners, and made her rather Americanly uncourteous on the lower levels.

Won’t you give our love to the Howellses all and particular? 
                         Sincerely yours
                                        S. L. Clemens.

The travel-book did not finish easily, and more than once when he thought it completed he found it necessary to cut and add and change.  The final chapters were not sent to the printer until the middle of May, and in a letter to Mr. Rogers he commented:  “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”  Clemens was at the time contemplating a uniform edition of his books, and in one of his letters to Mr. Rogers on the matter he wrote, whimsically, “Now I was proposing to make a thousand sets at a hundred dollars a set, and do the whole canvassing myself.....  I would load up every important jail and saloon in America with de luxe editions of my books.  But Mrs. Clemens and the children object to this, I do not know why.”  And, in a moment of depression:  “You see the lightning refuses to strike me—­there is where the defect is.  We have to do our own striking as Barney Barnato did.  But nobody ever gets the courage until he goes crazy.”

They went to Switzerland for the summer