But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian Summer, and to my mind there isn’t a waste line in it, or one that could be improved.  I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized.  I haven’t read Part I yet, because that number must have reached Hartford after we left; but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes I am to read both parts aloud to the family.  It is a beautiful story, and makes a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate—­and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again!  That is the thing that hurts.  Well, you have done it with marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does.  I can’t stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people; I see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death.  And as for “The Bostonians,” I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that. 
                                   Yrs Ever
          
                                   mark

It is as easy to understand Mark Twain’s enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians.  He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms.  It is interesting to note that in thanking Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote:  “What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to thank you for using your eyes.....  Did you ever read De Foe’s ‘Roxana’?  If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but for the best and most natural English that a book was ever written in.”

General Grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could, making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak.  Clemens visited him at Mt.  McGregor and brought the dying soldier the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to provide generously for his family, and that the sales would aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year.

This was some time in July.  On the 23d of that month General Grant died.  Immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most suitable place for the great chieftain to lie.  Mark Twain’s contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter, seems worthy of preservation here.

       To the New York “Sun,” on the proper place for Grant’s Tomb: