I haven’t as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it, but I’ve always done what I could to secure and enlarge my good opinion of it.  I’ve always said to myself, “Everybody reads it and that’s something—­it surely isn’t pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty tired of it.”  And when a critic said by implication that it wasn’t high and fine, through the remark “High and fine literature is wine” I retorted (confidentially, to myself,) “yes, high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”

You didn’t tell me to return that proof-slip, so I have pasted it into my
private scrap-book.  None will see it there.  With a thousand thanks. 
                              Ys Ever
          
                              mark.

Our next letter is an unmailed answer, but it does not belong with the others, having been withheld for reasons of quite a different sort.  Jeanette Gilder, then of the Critic, was one of Mark Twain’s valued friends.  In the comment which he made, when it was shown to him twenty-two years later, he tells us why he thinks this letter was not sent.  The name, “Rest-and-be-Thankful,” was the official title given to the summer place at Elmira, but it was more often known as “Quarry Farm.”

To Jeannette Gilder (not mailed): 

Hartford, May 14, ’87.  My dear miss Gilder,—­We shall spend the summer at the same old place-the remote farm called “Rest-and-be-Thankful,” on top of the hills three miles from Elmira, N. Y. Your other question is harder to answer.  It is my habit to keep four or five books in process of erection all the time, and every summer add a few courses of bricks to two or three of them; but I cannot forecast which of the two or three it is going to be.  It takes seven years to complete a book by this method, but still it is a good method:  gives the public a rest.  I have been accused of “rushing into print” prematurely, moved thereto by greediness for money; but in truth I have never done that.  Do you care for trifles of information? (Well, then, “Tom Sawyer” and “The Prince and the Pauper” were each on the stocks two or three years, and “Old Times on the Mississippi” eight.) One of my unfinished books has been on the stocks sixteen years; another seventeen.  This latter book could have been finished in a day, at any time during the past five years.  But as in the first of these two narratives all the action takes place in Noah’s ark, and as in the other the action takes place in heaven, there seemed to be no hurry, and so I have not hurried.  Tales of stirring adventure in those localities do not need to be rushed to publication lest they get stale by waiting.  In twenty-one years, with all my time at my free disposal I have written and completed only eleven books, whereas with half the labor that a journalist does I could have written sixty in that time.