These summer homes are commodious, well built, and well furnished—­facts which sufficiently indicate that the owners built them to live in themselves.  They have furnaces and wood fireplaces, and the rest of the comforts and conveniences of a city home, and can be comfortably occupied all the year round.

We cannot have this house next season, but I have secured Mrs. Upton’s house which is over in the law and science quarter, two or three miles from here, and about the same distance from the art, literary, and scholastic groups.  The science and law quarter has needed improving, this good while.

The nearest railway-station is distant something like an hour’s drive; it is three hours from there to Boston, over a branch line.  You can go to New York in six hours per branch lines if you change cars every time you think of it, but it is better to go to Boston and stop over and take the trunk line next day, then you do not get lost.

It is claimed that the atmosphere of the New Hampshire highlands is exceptionally bracing and stimulating, and a fine aid to hard and continuous work.  It is a just claim, I think.  I came in May, and wrought 35 successive days without a break.  It is possible that I could not have done it elsewhere.  I do not know; I have not had any disposition to try it, before.  I think I got the disposition out of the atmosphere, this time.  I feel quite sure, in fact, that that is where it came from.

I am ashamed to confess what an intolerable pile of manuscript I ground out in the 35 days, therefore I will keep the number of words to myself.  I wrote the first half of a long tale—­“The Adventures of a Microbe” and put it away for a finish next summer, and started another long tale—­“The Mysterious Stranger;” I wrote the first half of it and put it with the other for a finish next summer.  I stopped, then.  I was not tired, but I had no books on hand that needed finishing this year except one that was seven years old.  After a little I took that one up and finished it.  Not for publication, but to have it ready for revision next summer.

Since I stopped work I have had a two months’ holiday.  The summer has been my working time for 35 years; to have a holiday in it (in America) is new for me.  I have not broken it, except to write “Eve’s Diary” and “A Horse’s Tale”—­short things occupying the mill 12 days.

This year our summer is 6 months long and ends with November and the flight home to New York, but next year we hope and expect to stretch it another month and end it the first of December.

[No signature.]

The fact that he was a persistent smoker was widely known, and many friends and admirers of Mark Twain sent him cigars, most of which he could not use, because they were too good.  He did not care for Havana cigars, but smoked the fragrant, inexpensive domestic tobacco with plenty of “pep” in it, as we say today.  Now and then he had an opportunity to head off some liberal friend, who wrote asking permission to contribute to his cigar collection, as instance the following.

To Rev. L. M. Powers, in Haverhill, Mass.: