s all night building castles in the air; next day
raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered
$100,000,000, every cent he has in the world. Pauper accepts.
Millionaire: "Now give it to me."

Pauper: "No; it isn't a trade until you sign documental history of
the transaction and make an oath to pay."

While pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship.
When pauper says, "Sign and take the cracker," millionaire smiles a
smile, declines, and points to the ship.

Yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned
repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering
about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a
motif which developed into a very good story indeed.

IDEA FOR "STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN"

In modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers
connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by Jonathan
Edwards, Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang to
the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures
him is the means of making the righteous comfortable.

Then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were
to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as "Lockjaw Harris,"
"Influenza Smith," "Sinapism Davis," and a dozen or two more, a perfect
outbreak of disorders.

Another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to
present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live
for a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year
after year, subsisting on polar bears and other Arctic game.

An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night,
in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the
Sultan to death. That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells
came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the
opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it
seemed to him that he was "made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from
Scheherazade's prolixity."

"On the whole," he said, "it is not your best, nor your second best; but
all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to
indulge in."

And that was the truth. So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to
seclusion, and there remains to this day.

Clemens had one inspiration that summe