It is not a boy's
book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for
adults.

Moreover the book is plenty long enough as it stands. It is about 900
pages of MS, and may be 1000 when I shall have finished "working
up" vague places; so it would make from 130 to 150 pages of the
Atlantic--about what the Foregone Conclusion made, isn't it?

I would dearly like to see it in the Atlantic, but I doubt if it would
pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it. Bret Harte
has sold his novel (same size as mine, I should say) to Scribner's
Monthly for $6,500 (publication to begin in September, I think,) and he
gets a royalty of 7 1/2 per cent from Bliss in book form afterwards.
He gets a royalty of ten per cent on it in England (issued in serial
numbers) and the same royalty on it in book form afterwards, and is to
receive an advance payment of five hundred pounds the day the first
No. of the serial appears. If I could do as well, here, and there, with
mine, it might possibly pay me, but I seriously doubt it though it is
likely I could do better in England than Bret, who is not widely known
there.

You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things--but then my household
expenses are something almost ghastly.

By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him on through life (in
the first person) but not Tom Sawyer--he would not be a good character
for it.

I wish you would promise to read the MS of Tom Sawyer some time, and
see if you don't really decide that I am right in closing with him as a
boy--and point out the most glaring defects for me. It is a tremendous
favor to ask, and I expect you to refuse and would be ashamed to expect
you to do otherwise. But the thing has been so many months in my mind
that it seems a relief to snake it out. I don't know any other person
whose judgment I could venture to take fully and entirely. Don't
hesitate about saying no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would
have honest need to blush if you said yes.

Osgood and I are "going for" the puppy G---- on infringement of
trademark. To win one or two suits of this kind will set literary folks
on a firmer bottom. I wish Osgood would sue for stealing Holmes's poem.
Wouldn't it be gorgeous to sue R---- for petty larceny? I will promise
to go into court and swear I think him capable of stealing pea-nuts from
a blind pedlar.

Yrs ever,
CLEMENS.