pe it looks like a framed picture. All the study windows have
Venetian blinds; they long ago went out of fashion in America but they
have not been replaced with anything half as good yet.
The study is built on top of a tumbled rock-heap that has
morning-glories climbing about it and a stone stairway leading down
through and dividing it.
There now--if you have not time to read all this, turn it over to "Jock"
and drag in the judge to help.
Mrs. Clemens must put in a late picture of Susie--a picture which she
maintains is good, but which I think is slander on the child.
We revisit the Rutland Street home many a time in fancy, for we hold
every individual in it in happy and grateful memory.
Goodbye,
Your friend,
SAML. L. CLEMENS.
P. S.--I gave the P.O. Department a blast in the papers about sending
misdirected letters of mine back to the writers for reshipment, and
got a blast in return, through a New York daily, from the New York
postmaster. But I notice that misdirected letters find me, now, without
any unnecessary fooling around.
The new house in Hartford was now ready to be occupied, and in a
letter to Howells, written a little more than a fortnight after the
foregoing, we find them located in "part" of it. But what seems
more interesting is that paragraph of the letter which speaks of
close friendly relations still existing with the Warners, in that it
refutes a report current at this time that there was a break between
Clemens and Warner over the rights in the Sellers play. There was,
in fact, no such rupture. Warner, realizing that he had no hand in
the character of Sellers, and no share in the work of dramatization,
generously yielded all claim to any part of the returns.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, Sept. 20, 1876.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--All right, my boy, send proof sheets here. I amend
dialect stuff by talking and talking and talking it till it sounds
right--and I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro
sometimes (rarely) says "goin" and sometimes "gwyne," and they make just
such discrepancies in other words--and when you come to reproduce
them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer's
carelessness. But I want to work at the proofs and
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