of Clemens’s charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor’s hands.  But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us.  In due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first production.  At Rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that effect.  We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote.  Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands.  In this effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible.  At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it.  We would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him.  He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us.  I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in whose manner he did them.  But now, late toward spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.

Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft.  He went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and “in visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed,” ghastly forms of failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him:  “Here is a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner.  We are fools.”  Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us.  But Clemens was never a man to give up.  I relinquished gratis all right and title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in the country.  It never came to New York; and yet I think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded.  So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.

VII.