she has
written Mrs. Howells or not--I only know she was going to--and will yet,
if she hasn't. We are promising ourselves a whole world of pleasure in
the visit, and you mustn't dream of disappointing us.

Does this item stir an interest in you? Began a novel four days ago, and
this moment finished chapter four. Title of the book:

"Colonel Mulberry Sellers.
American Claimant
Of the
Great Earldom of Rossmore'
in the
Peerage of Great Britain."

Ys Ever
MARK.

Probably Mark Twain did not return to literary work reluctantly. He had
always enjoyed writing and felt now that he was equipped better than
ever for authorship, at least so far as material was concerned. There
exists a fragmentary copy of a letter to some unknown correspondent, in
which he recites his qualifications. It bears evidence of having been
written just at this time and is of unusual interest at this point.

*****

Fragment of Letter to -------, 1891:

.... I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pretending
to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life out on the
Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because
I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a soldier two weeks
once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole
time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more
burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that
death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw
soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is
the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see.

Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of
weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction.
And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little
patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in
pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted,
obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in.
There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket
hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find
it, or have even the fa