The price received by Mark Twain for the Mississippi papers, as quoted in this letter, furnishes us with a realizing sense of the improvement in the literary market, with the advent of a flood of cheap magazines and the Sunday newspaper.  The Atlantic page probably contained about a thousand words, which would make his price average, say, two cents per word.  Thirty years later, when his fame was not much more extended, his pay for the same matter would have been fifteen times as great, that is to say, at the rate of thirty cents per word.  But in that early time there were no Sunday magazines—­no literary magazines at all except the Atlantic, and Harpers, and a few fashion periodicals.  Probably there were news-stands, but it is hard to imagine what they must have looked like without the gay pictorial cover-femininity that to-day pleases and elevates the public and makes author and artist affluent.

Clemens worked steadily on the river chapters, and Howells was always praising him and urging him to go on.  At the end of January he wrote:  “You’re doing the science of piloting splendidly.  Every word’s interesting.  And don’t you drop the series ’til you’ve got every bit of anecdote and reminiscence into it.”

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, Feb. 10, 1875.  My dear Howells,—­Your praises of my literature gave me the solidest gratification; but I never did have the fullest confidence in my critical penetration, and now your verdict on S-----has knocked what little I did have gully-west!  I didn’t enjoy his gush, but I thought a lot of his similes were ever so vivid and good.  But it’s just my luck; every time I go into convulsions of admiration over a picture and want to buy it right away before I’ve lost the chance, some wretch who really understands art comes along and damns it.  But I don’t mind.  I would rather have my ignorance than another man’s knowledge, because I have got so much more of it.

I send you No. 5 today.  I have written and re-written the first half of it three different times, yesterday and today, and at last Mrs. Clemens says it will do.  I never saw a woman so hard to please about things she doesn’t know anything about. 
                              Yours ever,
          
                              mark.

Of course, the reference to his wife’s criticism in this is tenderly
playful, as always—­of a pattern with the severity which he pretends
for her in the next.

To Mrs. W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

1875 Dear Mrs. Howells,—­Mrs. Clemens is delighted to get the pictures, and so am I. I can perceive in the group, that Mr. Howells is feeling as I so often feel, viz:  “Well, no doubt I am in the wrong, though I do not know how or where or why—­but anyway it will be safest to look meek, and walk circumspectly for a while, and not discuss the thing.”  And you look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said, “Indeed I do not wonder that you can frame no reply:  for you know only too well, that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation or argument—­none!”