If this notion is not a foolish and wicked one, won’t you just consult with some chief Independents, and see if they won’t call a sudden convention and whoop the thing through?  To nominate Edmunds the 1st of November, would be soon enough, wouldn’t it?

With kindest regards to you and the Aldriches,
                                   Yr Truly
                                             S. L. Clemens.

Clemens and Cable set out on their reading-tour in November.  They were a curiously-assorted pair:  Cable was of orthodox religion, exact as to habits, neat, prim, all that Clemens was not.  In the beginning Cable undertook to read the Bible aloud to Clemens each evening, but this part of the day’s program was presently omitted by request.  If they spent Sunday in a town, Cable was up bright and early visiting the various churches and Sunday-schools, while Mark Twain remained at the hotel, in bed, reading or asleep.

XXV

The great year of 1885.  Clemens and cable.  Publication of “Huck Finn.”  The grant memoirs.  Mark twain at fifty

The year 1885 was in some respects the most important, certainly the most pleasantly exciting, in Mark Twain’s life.  It was the year in which he entered fully into the publishing business and launched one of the most spectacular of all publishing adventures, The Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant.  Clemens had not intended to do general publishing when he arranged with Webster to become sales-agent for the Mississippi book, and later general agent for Huck Finn’s adventures; he had intended only to handle his own books, because he was pretty thoroughly dissatisfied with other publishing arrangements.  Even the Library of Humor, which Howells, with Clark, of the Courant, had put together for him, he left with Osgood until that publisher failed, during the spring of 1885.  Certainly he never dreamed of undertaking anything of the proportions of the Grant book.

He had always believed that Grant could make a book.  More than once, when they had met, he had urged the General to prepare his memoirs for publication.  Howells, in his ‘My Mark Twain’, tells of going with Clemens to see Grant, then a member of the ill-fated firm of Grant and Ward, and how they lunched on beans, bacon and coffee brought in from a near-by restaurant.  It was while they were eating this soldier fare that Clemens—­very likely abetted by Howells —­especially urged the great commander to prepare his memoirs.  But Grant had become a financier, as he believed, and the prospect of literary earnings, however large, did not appeal to him.  Furthermore, he was convinced that he was without literary ability and that a book by him would prove a failure.