not
hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably--write
when I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer . . .
I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it
ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other
policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought
to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it
across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a
great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had
thought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and taken
the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness.

It was a long, heartfelt letter. Near the end of it he said:

Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a
marvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer
could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in
cleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his
faculty. You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid
innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere
policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a
midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around
the board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O'Reilly full,
Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the
floor and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when he
returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with
horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a
cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And
no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.

Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising
for the book, with "Life on the Mississippi" as his subject. Osgood was
careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as
well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back
of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it
was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to Osgood has
not been preserved.

Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday
Evening Club on "What is Happiness?" presenting a theory which in later
years he developed as a part of his "gospel," and promulgated in a
privately printed volu