I then enlarged the book—­had to.  Then he lost his voice.  He was not quite done yet, however:—­there was no end of little plums and spices to be stuck in, here and there; and this work he patiently continued, a few lines a day, with pad and pencil, till far into July, at Mt.  McGregor.  One day he put his pencil aside, and said he was done—­there was nothing more to do.  If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later.

Well, I’ve written all this, and it doesn’t seem to amount to anything.  But I do want to help, if I only could.  I will enclose some scraps from my Autobiography—­scraps about General Grant—­they may be of some trifle of use, and they may not—­they at least verify known traits of his character.  My Autobiography is pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to jack-plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude construction and rotten grammar.  It is the only dictating I ever did, and it was most troublesome and awkward work.  You may return it to Hartford. 
                         Sincerely Yours
                                        S. L. Clemens.

The old long-deferred Library of Humor came up again for discussion, when in the fall of 1885 Howells associated himself with Harper & Brothers.  Howells’s contract provided that his name was not to appear on any book not published by the Harper firm.  He wrote, therefore, offering to sell out his interest in the enterprise for two thousand dollars, in addition to the five hundred which he had already received—­an amount considered to be less than he was to have received as joint author and compiler.  Mark Twain’s answer pretty fully covers the details of this undertaking.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Hartford, Oct. 18, 1885. 
Private.

My dear Howells,—­I reckon it would ruin the book that is, make it necessary to pigeon-hole it and leave it unpublished.  I couldn’t publish it without a very responsible name to support my own on the title page, because it has so much of my own matter in it.  I bought Osgood’s rights for $3,000 cash, I have paid Clark $800 and owe him $700 more, which must of course be paid whether I publish or not.  Yet I fully recognize that I have no sort of moral right to let that ancient and procrastinated contract hamper you in any way, and I most certainly won’t.  So, it is my decision,—­after thinking over and rejecting the idea of trying to buy permission of the Harpers for $2,500 to use your name, (a proposition which they would hate to refuse to a man in a perplexed position, and yet would naturally have to refuse it,) to pigeon-hole the “Library”:  not destroy it, but merely pigeon-hole it and wait a few years and see what new notion Providence will take concerning it.  He will not desert us now, after putting in four licks to our one on this book all this time.  It really seems in a sense discourteous not to call it “Providence’s Library of Humor.”