BAD-NAUHEIM, June 11, '92.

Saturday.

DEAR MR. HALL,--If this arrives before I do, let it inform you that I am
leaving Bremen for New York next Tuesday in the "Havel."

If you can meet me when the ship arrives, you can help me to get away
from the reporters; and maybe you can take me to your own or some other
lodgings where they can't find me.

But if the hour is too early or too late for you, I shall obscure myself
somewhere till I can come to the office.

Yours sincerely S. L. C.

Nothing of importance happened in America. The new Paige company
had a factory started in Chicago and expected to manufacture fifty
machines as a beginning. They claimed to have capital, or to be
able to command it, and as the main control had passed from
Clemens's hands, he could do no more than look over the ground and
hope for the best. As for the business, about all that he could do
was to sign certain notes necessary to provide such additional
capital as was needed, and agree with Hall that hereafter they would
concentrate their efforts and resist further temptation in the way
of new enterprise. Then he returned to Bad-Nauheim and settled down
to literature. This was the middle of July, and he must have worked
pretty steadily, for he presently had a variety of MSS. ready to
offer.

*****

To Fred J. Hall, in New York:

Aug. 10, '92.

DEAR MR. HALL,--I have dropped that novel I wrote you about, because I
saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit: by telling
it through the lips of Huck Finn. So I have started Huck Finn and Tom
Sawyer (still 15 years old) and their friend the freed slave Jim around
the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, and somewhere after
the end of that great voyage he will work in the said episode and then
nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written and the globe
circumnavigated merely to get that episode in an effective (and at the
same time apparently unintentional) way. I have written 12,000 words
of this narrative, and find that the humor flows as easily as the
adventures and surprises--so I shall go along and make a book of from
50,000 to 100,000 words.

It is a story for boys, of course, and I think will interest