This was a little over five weeks ago—­so I had long ago concluded that Bliss didn’t want the machine and did want the saddle—­wherefore I jumped at the chance of shoving the machine off onto you, saddle or no saddle so I got the blamed thing out of my sight.

The saddle hangs on Tara’s walls down below in the stable, and the machine is at Bliss’s grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly and implacably rotting away another man’s chances for salvation.

I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn,) but to let me know when he has got his dose, because I’ve got another candidate for damnation.  You just wait a couple of weeks and if you don’t see the Type-Writer come tilting along toward Cambridge with an unsatisfied appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.

Don’t you be mad about this blunder, Howells—­it only comes of a bad
memory, and the stupidity which is inseparable from true genius.  Nothing
intentionally criminal in it. 
                              Yrs ever
          
                              mark.

     It was November when Howells finally fell under the baleful
     influence of the machine.  He wrote: 

“The typewriter came Wednesday night, and is already beginning to have its effect on me.  Of course, it doesn’t work:  if I can persuade some of the letters to get up against the ribbon they won’t get down again without digital assistance.  The treadle refuses to have any part or parcel in the performance; and I don’t know how to get the roller to turn with the paper.  Nevertheless I have begun several letters to My d-a-r lemans, as it prefers to spell your respected name, and I don’t despair yet of sending you something in its beautiful handwriting—­after I’ve had a man out from the agent’s to put it in order.  It’s fascinating in the meantime, and it wastes my time like an old friend.”

The Clemens family remained in Hartford that summer, with the exception of a brief season at Bateman’s Point, R. I., near Newport.  By this time Mark Twain had taken up and finished the Tom Sawyer story begun two years before.  Naturally he wished Howells to consider the Ms.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, July 5th, 1875.  My dear Howells,—­I have finished the story and didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood.  I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically—­like Gil Blas.  I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person.  If I went on, now, and took him into manhood, he would just like like all the one-horse men in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.  It is not a boy’s book, at all.  It will only be read by adults.  It is only written for adults.

Moreover the book is plenty long enough as it stands.  It is about 900 pages of Ms, and may be 1000 when I shall have finished “working up” vague places; so it would make from 130 to 150 pages of the Atlantic —­about what the Foregone Conclusion made, isn’t it?