11.30 P. M.—­Gibraltar. 
At anchor and all right, but they won’t let us land till morning—­it is a
waste of valuable time.  We shall reach New York middle of November. 
                                   Yours,
          
                                   Sam.

Cadiz, Oct 24, 1867.  Dear folks,—­We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras, (4 hours) thus dodging the quarantine, took dinner and then rode horseback all night in a swinging trot and at daylight took a caleche (a wheeled vehicle) and rode 5 hours—­then took cars and traveled till twelve at night.  That landed us at Seville and we were over the hard part of our trip, and somewhat tired.  Since then we have taken things comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and attracting a good deal of attention, for I guess strangers do not wander through Andalusia and the other Southern provinces of Spain often.  The country is precisely as it was when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were possible characters.

But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was under Moorish domination.  No, I will not say that, but then when one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created them.

I cannot write now.  I am only dropping a line to let you know I am well.  The ship will call for us here tomorrow.  We may stop at Lisbon, and shall at the Bermudas, and will arrive in New York ten days after this letter gets there. 
                                   Sam.

This is the last personal letter written during that famous first sea-gipsying, and reading it our regret grows that he did not put something of his Spanish excursion into his book.  He never returned to Spain, and he never wrote of it.  Only the barest mention of “seven beautiful days” is found in The Innocents Abroad.

VIII.

Letters 1867-68.  Washington and San Francisco.  The proposed book of travel.  A new lecture

From Mark Twain’s home letters we get several important side-lights on this first famous book.  We learn, for in stance, that it was he who drafted the ship address to the Emperor—­the opening lines of which became so wearisome when repeated by the sailors.  Furthermore, we learn something of the scope and extent of his newspaper correspondence, which must have kept him furiously busy, done as it was in the midst of super-heated and continuous sight-seeing.  He wrote fifty three letters to the Alta-California, six to the New York Tribune, and at least two to the New York Herald more than sixty, all told, of an average, length of three to four thousand words each.  Mark Twain always claimed to be a