can't
cash. I have marked this "private" because it is for the friends who are
attending to the matter for us in New York to reveal it when they want
to and if they want to. There are only two claims which I dispute and
which I mean to look into personally before I pay them. But they are
small. Both together they amount to only $12,500. I hope you will never
get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me 3
years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things
that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble,
after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; and the
children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping, from the
beginning.

We all send you and all of you our love.

MARK.

Howells wrote: "I wish you could understand how unshaken you are,
you old tower, in every way; your foundations are struck so deep
that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, and bask in the
same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare."

The Clemens apartments at the Metropole became a sort of social
clearing-house of the Viennese art and literary life, much more like
an embassy than the home of a mere literary man. Celebrities in
every walk of life, persons of social and official rank, writers for
the press, assembled there on terms hardly possible in any other
home in Vienna. Wherever Mark Twain appeared in public he was a
central figure. Now and then he read or spoke to aid some benefit,
and these were great gatherings attended by members of the royal
family. It was following one such event that the next letter was
written.

(Private)

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

HOTEL METROPOLE,
VIENNA, Feb. 3, '98.

DEAR JOE, There's that letter that I began so long ago--you see how
it is: can't get time to finish anything. I pile up lots of work,
nevertheless. There may be idle people in the world, but I'm not one of
them. I say "Private" up there because I've got an adventure to tell,
and you mustn't let a breath of it get out. First I thought I would
lay it up along with a thousand others that I've laid up for the same
purpose--to talk to you about, but--those others have vanished out of my
memory; and that must not happ