I do not greatly mind being accused of a proclivity for rushing into print, but at the same time I don’t believe that the charge is really well founded.  Suppose I did write eleven books, have you nothing to be grateful for?  Go to—–­remember the forty-nine which I didn’t write. 
                              Truly Yours
                                        S. L. Clemens.

Notes (added twenty-two years later): 

Stormfield, April 30, 1909.  It seems the letter was not sent.  I probably feared she might print it, and I couldn’t find a way to say so without running a risk of hurting her.  No one would hurt Jeannette Gilder purposely, and no one would want to run the risk of doing it unintentionally.  She is my neighbor, six miles away, now, and I must ask her about this ancient letter.

I note with pride and pleasure that I told no untruths in my unsent answer.  I still have the habit of keeping unfinished books lying around years and years, waiting.  I have four or five novels on hand at present in a half-finished condition, and it is more than three years since I have looked at any of them.  I have no intention of finishing them.  I could complete all of them in less than a year, if the impulse should come powerfully upon me:  Long, long ago money-necessity furnished that impulse once, ("Following the Equator"), but mere desire for money has never furnished it, so far as I remember.  Not even money-necessity was able to overcome me on a couple of occasions when perhaps I ought to have allowed it to succeed.  While I was a bankrupt and in debt two offers were made me for weekly literary contributions to continue during a year, and they would have made a debtless man of me, but I declined them, with my wife’s full approval, for I had known of no instance where a man had pumped himself out once a week and failed to run “emptyings” before the year was finished.

As to that “Noah’s Ark” book, I began it in Edinburgh in 1873;—­[This is not quite correct.  The “Noah’s Ark” book was begun in Buffalo in 1870.] I don’t know where the manuscript is now.  It was a Diary, which professed to be the work of Shem, but wasn’t.  I began it again several months ago, but only for recreation; I hadn’t any intention of carrying it to a finish —­or even to the end of the first chapter, in fact.

As to the book whose action “takes place in Heaven.”  That was a small
thing, ("Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”) It lay in my
pigeon-holes 40 years, then I took it out and printed it in Harper’s
Monthly last year. 
                         S. L. C.

In the next letter we get a pretty and peaceful picture of “Rest-and-be-Thankful.”  These were Mark Twain’s balmy days.  The financial drain of the type-machine was heavy but not yet exhausting, and the prospect of vast returns from it seemed to grow brighter each day.  His publishing business, though less profitable, was still prosperous, his family life was ideal.  How gratefully, then, he could enter into the peace of that “perfect day.”