The New Orleans idea continued to haunt the letters.  The thought of drifting down the Mississippi so attracted both Clemens and Howells, that they talked of it when they met, and wrote of it when they were separated.  Howells, beset by uncertainties, playfully tried to put the responsibility upon his wife.  Once he wrote:  “She says in the noblest way, ‘Well, go to New Orleans, if you want to so much’ (you know the tone).  I suppose it will do if I let you know about the middle of February?”

But they had to give it up in the end.  Howells wrote that he had been under the weather, and on half work the whole winter.  He did not feel that he had earned his salary, he said, or that he was warranted in taking a three weeks’ pleasure trip.  Clemens offered to pay all the expenses of the trip, but only indefinite postponement followed.  It would be seven years more before Mark Twain would return to the river, and then not with Howells.

In a former chapter mention has been made of Charles Warren Stoddard, whom Mark Twain had known in his California days.  He was fond of Stoddard, who was a facile and pleasing writer of poems and descriptive articles.  During the period that he had been acting as Mark Twain’s secretary in London, he had taken pleasure in collecting for him the news reports of the celebrated Tichborn Claimant case, then in the English courts.  Clemens thought of founding a story on it, and did, in fact, use the idea, though ’The American Claimant,’ which he wrote years later, had little or no connection with the Tichborn episode.

To C. W. Stoddard: 

Hartford, Feb. 1, 1875.  Dear Charley,—­All right about the Tichborn scrapbooks; send them along when convenient.  I mean to have the Beecher-Tilton trial scrap-book as a companion.....

I am writing a series of 7-page articles for the Atlantic at $20 a page; but as they do not pay anybody else as much as that, I do not complain (though at the same time I do swear that I am not content.) However the awful respectability of the magazine makes up.

I have cut your articles about San Marco out of a New York paper (Joe Twichell saw it and brought it home to me with loud admiration,) and sent it to Howells.  It is too bad to fool away such good literature in a perishable daily journal.

Do remember us kindly to Lady Hardy and all that rare family—­my wife and
I so often have pleasant talks about them. 
                         Ever your friend,
                                   Saml.  L. Clemens.