While Livy and Miss Spaulding have been writing at this table, I have sat tilted back, near by, with a pipe and the last Atlantic, and read Charley Warner’s article with prodigious enjoyment.  I think it is exquisite.  I think it must be the roundest and broadest and completest short essay he has ever written.  It is clear, and compact, and charmingly done.

The hotel grounds join and communicate with the Castle grounds; so we and the children loaf in the winding paths of those leafy vastnesses a great deal, and drink beer and listen to excellent music.

When we first came to this hotel, a couple of weeks ago, I pointed to a house across the river, and said I meant to rent the centre room on the 3d floor for a work-room.  Jokingly we got to speaking of it as my office; and amused ourselves with watching “my people” daily in their small grounds and trying to make out what we could of their dress, &c., without a glass.  Well, I loafed along there one day and found on that house the only sign of the kind on that side of the river:  “Moblirte Wohnung zu Vermiethen!” I went in and rented that very room which I had long ago selected.  There was only one other room in the whole double-house unrented.

(It occurs to me that I made a great mistake in not thinking to deliver a very bad German speech, every other sentence pieced out with English, at the Bayard Taylor banquet in New York.  I think I could have made it one of the features of the occasion.)—­[He used this plan at a gathering of the American students in Heidelberg, on July 4th, with great effect; so his idea was not wasted.]

We left Hartford before the end of March, and I have been idle ever since.  I have waited for a call to go to work—­I knew it would come.  Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; 3 days ago I concluded to move my manuscript over to my den.  Now the call is loud and decided at last.  So tomorrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till middle of July or 1st August, when I look for Twichell; we will then walk about Germany 2 or 3 weeks, and then I’ll go to work again—­(perhaps in Munich.)

We both send a power of love to the Howellses, and we do wish you were
here.  Are you in the new house?  Tell us about it. 
                                             Yrs Ever
          
                                        mark.

There has been no former mention in the letters of the coming of Twichell; yet this had been a part of the European plan.  Mark Twain had invited his walking companion to make a tramp with him through Europe, as his guest.  Material for the new book would grow faster with Twichell as a companion; and these two in spite of their widely opposed views concerning Providence and the general scheme of creation, were wholly congenial comrades.  Twichell, in Hartford, expecting to receive the final summons to start, wrote: