Boston:

ELMIRA, Sept. 15, 1879.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--When and where? Here on the farm would be an elegant
place to meet, but of course you cannot come so far. So we will say
Hartford or Belmont, about the beginning of November. The date of our
return to Hartford is uncertain, but will be three or four weeks hence,
I judge. I hope to finish my book here before migrating.

I think maybe I've got some Atlantic stuff in my head, but there's none
in MS, I believe.

Say--a friend of mine wants to write a play with me, I to furnish the
broad-comedy cuss. I don't know anything about his ability, but his
letter serves to remind me of our old projects. If you haven't used
Orion or Old Wakeman, don't you think you and I can get together and
grind out a play with one of those fellows in it? Orion is a field
which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new
top-dressing of religion or other guano. Drop me an immediate line about
this, won't you? I imagine I see Orion on the stage, always gentle,
always melancholy, always changing his politics and religion, and trying
to reform the world, always inventing something, and losing a limb by
a new kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts. Poor old
chap, he is good material. I can imagine his wife or his sweetheart
reluctantly adopting each of his new religious in turn, just in time to
see him waltz into the next one and leave her isolated once more.

(Mem. Orion's wife has followed him into the outer darkness, after 30
years' rabid membership in the Presbyterian Church.)

Well, with the sincerest and most abounding love to you and yours, from
all this family, I am,

Yrs ever
MARK.

The idea of the play interested Howells, but he had twinges of
conscience in the matter of using Orion as material. He wrote:
"More than once I have taken the skeleton of that comedy of ours and
viewed it with tears..... I really have a compunction or two about
helping to put your brother into drama. You can say that he is your
brother, to do what you like with him, but the alien hand might
inflict an incurable hurt on his tender heart."

As a matter of fact, Orion Clemens had a keen appreciation of his
own shortcomings, and would have enjoyed himself in a play as much
as any observer of it. Indeed, it is more than