interest boys, but will also strongly
interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges
the audience.

Now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine
--it is proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a
syndicate. I don't swear it, but I think so.

Proposed title--New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

He was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of
the Extraordinary Twins:

By and by I shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel
entitled, 'Those Extraordinary Twins'. It's the howling farce I
told you I had begun awhile back. I laid it aside to ferment while
I wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad, but I took it up again on a little
different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now.
I think all sorts of folks will read it. It is clear out of the
common order--it is a fresh idea--I don't think it resembles
anything in literature.

He was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did
it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to
literature would eventually grow out of it.

In a letter written many years afterward by Frank Mason, then
consul-general at Frankfort, he refers to "that happy summer at Nauheim."
Mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of
the summer was justified. For one thing, Clemens himself was in better
health and spirits and able to continue his work. But an even greater
happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced Mrs.
Clemens free from any organic ills. To Orion, Clemens wrote:

We are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that
Livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles
and will soon be well again. That was worth going to Europe to find
out.

It was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and
financial worries were less considered. Another letter to Orion relates
history:

The Twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with
them. Joe & I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure-resort,
Saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning I went walking in
the promenade & met the British ambassador to the Court of Berlin
and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales. I found him a most
unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman.

Twichell h