the performance. Then
began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time
resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to
dispose of his version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait for it to
arrive, but began immediately a version of his own. Just how much or how
little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as
presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now. Howells conveys the
impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the
character of Sellers as taken from the book. But in a letter still
extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:

I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been
complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
force.

The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a
year--that is, to Egypt.

Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
declared that "not one line" of Densmore's dramatization was used,
"except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age." During the
newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for
the Hartford Post. This letter was suppressed, but it still exists. In
it he says:

I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but
little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences
of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall keep my
word.

This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully
satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says: "Your
letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this place permit me to
thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this
matter."

Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely
of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator
should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic
venture and reap such rewards as might result. Various stories have been
told of this