I am mighty glad you are done your book (this is from a man who, above all others, feels how much that sentence means) and am also mighty glad you have begun the next (this is also from a man who knows the felicity of that, and means straightway to enjoy it.) The Undiscovered starts off delightfully—­I have read it aloud to Mrs. C. and we vastly enjoyed it.

Well, time’s about up—­must drop a line to Aldrich. 
                                             Yrs ever,
          
                                             mark.

In a letter which Mark Twain wrote to his brother Orion at this period we get the first hint of a venture which was to play an increasingly important part in the Hartford home and fortunes during the next ten or a dozen years.  This was the type-setting machine investment, which, in the end, all but wrecked Mark Twain’s finances.  There is but a brief mention of it in the letter to Orion, and the letter itself is not worth preserving, but as references to the “machine” appear with increasing frequency, it seems proper to record here its first mention.  In the same letter he suggests to his brother that he undertake an absolutely truthful autobiography, a confession in which nothing is to be withheld.  He cites the value of Casanova’s memories, and the confessions of Rousseau.  Of course, any literary suggestion from “Brother Sam” was gospel to Orion, who began at once piling up manuscript at a great rate.

Meantime, Mark Twain himself, having got ‘A Tramp Abroad’ on the presses, was at work with enthusiasm on a story begun nearly three years before at Quarry Farm-a story for children-its name, as he called it then, “The Little Prince and The Little Pauper.”  He was presently writing to Howells his delight in the new work.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, Mch. 11, ’80. 
My dear Howells,--.....I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loth
to hurry, not wanting to get it done.   Did I ever tell you the plot of
it?   It begins at 9 a.m., Jan. 27, 1547, seventeen and a half hours
before Henry VIII’s death, by the swapping of clothes and place, between
the prince of Wales and a pauper boy of the same age and countenance (and
half as much learning and still more genius and imagination) and after
that, the rightful small King has a rough time among tramps and ruffians
in the country parts of Kent, whilst the small bogus King has a gilded
and worshipped and dreary and restrained and cussed time of it on the
throne—­and this all goes on for three weeks—­till the midst of the
coronation grandeurs in Westminster Abbey, Feb. 20, when the ragged true
King forces his way in but cannot prove his genuineness—­until the bogus
King, by a remembered incident of the first day is able to prove it for
him—­whereupon clothes are changed and the coronation proceeds under the
new and rightful conditions.

My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others—­all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished Edward VI’s reign from those that preceded and followed it.