I did write eleven books, have you nothing to be grateful for?
Go to---remember the forty-nine which I didn't write.

Truly Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.

Notes (added twenty-two years later):

Stormfield, April 30, 1909. It seems the letter was not sent. I probably
feared she might print it, and I couldn't find a way to say so without
running a risk of hurting her. No one would hurt Jeannette Gilder
purposely, and no one would want to run the risk of doing it
unintentionally. She is my neighbor, six miles away, now, and I must ask
her about this ancient letter.

I note with pride and pleasure that I told no untruths in my unsent
answer. I still have the habit of keeping unfinished books lying around
years and years, waiting. I have four or five novels on hand at present
in a half-finished condition, and it is more than three years since I
have looked at any of them. I have no intention of finishing them. I
could complete all of them in less than a year, if the impulse should
come powerfully upon me: Long, long ago money-necessity furnished that
impulse once, ("Following the Equator"), but mere desire for money has
never furnished it, so far as I remember. Not even money-necessity was
able to overcome me on a couple of occasions when perhaps I ought to
have allowed it to succeed. While I was a bankrupt and in debt two
offers were made me for weekly literary contributions to continue during
a year, and they would have made a debtless man of me, but I declined
them, with my wife's full approval, for I had known of no instance where
a man had pumped himself out once a week and failed to run "emptyings"
before the year was finished.

As to that "Noah's Ark" book, I began it in Edinburgh in 1873;--[This is
not quite correct. The "Noah's Ark" book was begun in Buffalo in
1870.] I don't know where the manuscript is now. It was a Diary, which
professed to be the work of Shem, but wasn't. I began it again several
months ago, but only for recreation; I hadn't any intention of carrying
it to a finish--or even to the end of the first chapter, in fact.

As to the book whose action "takes place in Heaven." That was a
small thing, ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.") It lay in my
pigeon-holes 40 years, then I took it out and printed it in Harper's
Monthly last year.

S. L. C.

In the next letter we get a pretty and