with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find
out--I will see to it that they get the money they need. Then the thing
will move right along and your royalties will cease to be waste paper.
I will post you the minute my scheme fails or succeeds. In the meantime,
you stop walking the floor. Go off to the country and try to be gay.
You may have to go to walking again, but don't begin till I tell you my
scheme has failed." And he added: "Keep me posted always as to where you
are--for if I need you and can use you--I want to know where to put my
hand on you."

If I should even divulge the fact that the Standard Oil is merely
talking remotely about going into the type-setter, it would send my
royalties up.

With worlds and worlds of love and kisses to you all,

SAML.

With so great a burden of care shifted to the broad financial shoulders
of H. H. Rogers, Mark Twain's spirits went ballooning, soaring toward
the stars. He awoke, too, to some of the social gaieties about him, and
found pleasure in the things that in the hour of his gloom had seemed
mainly mockery. We find him going to a Sunday evening at Howells's, to
John Mackay's, and elsewhere.

*****

To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:

Dec. 2, '93.

LIVY DARLING,--Last night at John Mackay's the dinner consisted of soup,
raw oysters, corned beef and cabbage, and something like a custard.
I ate without fear or stint, and yet have escaped all suggestion of
indigestion. The men present were old gray Pacific-coasters whom I knew
when I and they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when
we went gypsying a long time ago--thirty years. Indeed it was a talk
of the dead. Mainly that. And of how they looked, and the harum-scarum
things they did and said. For there were no cares in that life, no aches
and pains, and not time enough in the day (and three-fourths of the
night) to work off one's surplus vigor and energy. Of the mid-night
highway robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the
windswept and desolate Gold Hill Divide, no witness is left but me, the
victim. All the friendly robbers are gone. These old fools last night
laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten
crime.

John Mackay has no family here but a pet monkey--a most affectionate and
winning little devil. But he makes trouble for