e out of the small boy Alfred, with his alert
eye and military brevity and exactness of speech; and out of the old
landlady; and her sacred onions; and her daughter; and the visiting
clergyman; and the ancient pianos of Hamilton and the venerable music
in vogue there--and forty other things which we shall leave untouched
or touched but lightly upon, we not being worthy." "Dam Howells for not
being here!" (this usually from me, not Twichell.)

O, your insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day! If you had
gone with us and let me pay the $50 which the trip and the board and
the various nicknacks and mementoes would cost, I would have picked up
enough droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit
in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written,
whereas I can now write only one or two and am therefore largely out of
pocket by your proud ways. Ponder these things. Lord, what a perfectly
bewitching excursion it was! I traveled under an assumed name and was
never molested with a polite attention from anybody.

Love to you all.
Yrs ever
MARK

Aldrich, meantime, had invited the Clemenses to Ponkapog during the
Bermuda absence, and Clemens hastened to send him a line expressing
regrets. At the close he said:

*****

To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.:

FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, June 3, 1877.

Day after tomorrow we leave for the hills beyond Elmira, N. Y. for the
summer, when I shall hope to write a book of some sort or other to beat
the people with. A work similar to your new one in the Atlantic is what
I mean, though I have not heard what the nature of that one is. Immoral,
I suppose. Well, you are right. Such books sell best, Howells says.
Howells says he is going to make his next book indelicate. He says
he thinks there is money in it. He says there is a large class of the
young, in schools and seminaries who--But you let him tell you. He has
ciphered it all down to a demonstration.

With the warmest remembrances to the pair of you

Ever Yours
SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.

Clemens would naturally write something about Bermuda, and began at
once, "Random Notes of an Idle Excursion," and presently completed
four paper