Mrs. Clemens had a long and wasting spell of sickness last Spring, but she is pulling up, now.  The children are booming, and my health is ridiculous, it’s so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports.

I haven’t piled up Ms so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm three weeks and a half ago.  Why, it’s like old times, to step right into the study, damp from the breakfast table, and sail right in and sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words.

I wrote 4000 words to-day and I touch 3000 and upwards pretty often, and don’t fall below 1600 any working day.  And when I get fagged out, I lie abed a couple of days and read and smoke, and then go it again for 6 or 7 days.  I have finished one small book, and am away along in a big 433 one that I half-finished two or three years ago.  I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more.  And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not.

It’s a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer.   There’s a raft episode from it
in second or third chapter of life on the Mississippi.....

I’m booming, these days—­got health and spirits to waste—­got an overplus; and if I were at home, we would write a play.  But we must do it anyhow by and by.

We stay here till Sep. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck for sea air, then home.

We are powerful glad you are all back; and send love according.

                         Yrs Ever
                              mark

To Onion Clemens and family, in Keokuk, Id.: 

Elmira, July 22, ’83. 
Private.

Dear ma and Orion and Mollie,—­I don’t know that I have anything new to report, except that Livy is still gaining, and all the rest of us flourishing.  I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years.  I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way.  I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 7 years.  This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.

Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day.  So I did it, and took the open air.  Then I struck an idea for the instruction of the children, and went to work and carried it out.  It took me all day.  I measured off 817 feet of the road-way in our farm grounds, with a foot-rule, and then divided it up among the English reigns, from the Conqueror down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year.  I whittled out a basket of little pegs and drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, and gave it that King’s name—­thus: 

I measured all the reigns exactly as many feet to the reign as there were years in it.  You can look out over the grounds and see the little pegs from the front door—­some of them close together, like Richard II, Richard Cromwell, James II, &c; and some prodigiously wide apart, like Henry III, Edward III, George III, &c.  It gives the children a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign.  Shall invent a violent game to go with it.