Orion Clemens, meantime, had conceived a new literary idea and was piling in his Ms. as fast as possible to get his brother’s judgment on it before the sailing-date.  It was not a very good time to send Ms., but Mark Twain seems to have read it and given it some consideration.  “The Journey in Heaven,” of his own, which he mentions, was the story published so many years later under the title of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”  He had began it in 1868, on his voyage to San Francisco, it having been suggested by conversations with Capt.  Ned Wakeman, of one of the Pacific steamers.  Wakeman also appears in ‘Roughing It,’ Chap.  L, as Capt.  Ned Blakely, and again in one of the “Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” as “Captain Hurricane Jones.”

To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk: 

Hartford, Mch. 23, 1878.  My dear Bro.,—­Every man must learn his trade—­not pick it up.  God requires that he learn it by slow and painful processes.  The apprentice-hand, in black-smithing, in medicine, in literature, in everything, is a thing that can’t be hidden.  It always shows.

But happily there is a market for apprentice work, else the “Innocents Abroad” would have had no sale.  Happily, too, there’s a wider market for some sorts of apprentice literature than there is for the very best of journey-work.  This work of yours is exceedingly crude, but I am free to say it is less crude than I expected it to be, and considerably better work than I believed you could do, it is too crude to offer to any prominent periodical, so I shall speak to the N. Y. Weekly people.  To publish it there will be to bury it.  Why could not same good genius have sent me to the N. Y. Weekly with my apprentice sketches?

You should not publish it in book form at all—­for this reason:  it is only an imitation of Verne—­it is not a burlesque.  But I think it may be regarded as proof that Verne cannot be burlesqued.

In accompanying notes I have suggested that you vastly modify the first visit to hell, and leave out the second visit altogether.  Nobody would, or ought to print those things.  You are not advanced enough in literature to venture upon a matter requiring so much practice.  Let me show you what a man has got to go through: 

Nine years ago I mapped out my “Journey in Heaven.”  I discussed it with literary friends whom I could trust to keep it to themselves.

I gave it a deal of thought, from time to time.  After a year or more I wrote it up.  It was not a success.  Five years ago I wrote it again, altering the plan.  That Ms is at my elbow now.  It was a considerable improvement on the first attempt, but still it wouldn’t do—­last year and year before I talked frequently with Howells about the subject, and he kept urging me to do it again.