ondon, he had taken pleasure in
collecting for him the news reports of the celebrated Tichborn
Claimant case, then in the English courts. Clemens thought of
founding a story on it, and did, in fact, use the idea, though 'The
American Claimant,' which he wrote years later, had little or no
connection with the Tichborn episode.

*****

To C. W. Stoddard:

HARTFORD, Feb. 1, 1875.

DEAR CHARLEY,--All right about the Tichborn scrapbooks; send them along
when convenient. I mean to have the Beecher-Tilton trial scrap-book as a
companion.....

I am writing a series of 7-page articles for the Atlantic at $20 a page;
but as they do not pay anybody else as much as that, I do not complain
(though at the same time I do swear that I am not content.) However the
awful respectability of the magazine makes up.

I have cut your articles about San Marco out of a New York paper (Joe
Twichell saw it and brought it home to me with loud admiration,) and
sent it to Howells. It is too bad to fool away such good literature in a
perishable daily journal.

Do remember us kindly to Lady Hardy and all that rare family--my wife
and I so often have pleasant talks about them.

Ever your friend,
SAML. L. CLEMENS.

The price received by Mark Twain for the Mississippi papers, as
quoted in this letter, furnishes us with a realizing sense of the
improvement in the literary market, with the advent of a flood of
cheap magazines and the Sunday newspaper. The Atlantic page
probably contained about a thousand words, which would make his
price average, say, two cents per word. Thirty years later, when
his fame was not much more extended, his pay for the same matter
would have been fifteen times as great, that is to say, at the rate
of thirty cents per word. But in that early time there were no
Sunday magazines--no literary magazines at all except the Atlantic,
and Harpers, and a few fashion periodicals. Probably there were
news-stands, but it is hard to imagine what they must have looked
like without the gay pictorial cover-femininity that to-day pleases
and elevates the public and makes author and artist affluent.

Clemens worked steadily on the river chapters, and Howells was
always praising him and urging him to go on. At the end of