my own exalting.  I am humanly fond of honors that happen but chary of those that come by canvass and intention.  With sincere thanks to you and your associates for this high compliment which you have been minded to offer me, I am,
                                   Very truly yours,
                                             S. L. Clemens.

We have seen in the letter to MacAlister that Mark Twain’s wife had been ordered to Italy and plans were in progress for an establishment there.  By the end of June Mrs. Clemens was able to leave Riverdale, and she made the journey to Quarry Farm, Elmira, where they would remain until October, the month planned for their sailing.  The house in Hartford had been sold; and a house which, prior to Mrs. Clemens’s breakdown they had bought near Tarrytown (expecting to settle permanently on the Hudson) had been let.  They were going to Europe for another indefinite period.

At Quarry Farm Mrs. Clemens continued to improve, and Clemens, once more able to work, occupied the study which Mrs. Crane had built for him thirty years before, and where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Wandering Prince had been called into being.

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford, Conn.: 

         &nb
sp;                                   Quarryfarm, Elmira, N. Y.,
                                                       July 21, ’03. 
Dear Joe,—­That love-letter delighted Livy beyond any like utterance received by her these thirty years and more.  I was going to answer it for her right away, and said so; but she reserved the privilege to herself.  I judge she is accumulating Hot Stuff—­as George Ade would say. . . .

Livy is coming along:  eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of the night, makes excursions in carriage and in wheel-chair; and, in the matter of superintending everything and everybody, has resumed business at the old stand.

Did you ever go house-hunting 3,000 miles away?  It costs three months of writing and telegraphing to pull off a success.  We finished 3 or 4 days ago, and took the Villa Papiniano (dam the name, I have to look at it a minutes after writing it, and then am always in doubt) for a year by cable.  Three miles outside of Florence, under Fiesole—­a darling location, and apparently a choice house, near Fiske.

There’s 7 in our gang.  All women but me.  It means trunks and things.  But thanks be!  To-day (this is private) comes a most handsome voluntary document with seals and escutcheons on it from the Italian Ambassador (who is a stranger to me) commanding the Customs people to keep their hands off the Clemens’s things.  Now wasn’t it lovely of him?  And wasn’t it lovely of me to let Livy take a pencil and edit my answer and knock a good third of it out?