een in the beginning. Howells put in a night of
suffering--long, dark hours of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising
next morning from a tossing bed, wrote: "Here's a play which every
manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has
refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools."

Clemens hurried over to Boston to consult with Howells, and in the end
they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the
play off and give Burbank his freedom. But Clemens's faith in it did
not immediately die. Howells relinquished all right and title in it,
and Clemens started it out with Burbank and a traveling company, doing
one-night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own
expense. It never reached New York.

"And yet," says Howells, "I think now that if it had come it would have
been successful. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist
die."--[This was as late as the spring of 1886, at which time Howells's
faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. In one letter he wrote: "It
is a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might
amuse, I'm afraid that in three he would simply bore."

And again:

"As it stands, I believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace
to have it succeed."]

CXLVIII. CABLE AND HIS GREAT JOKE

Meanwhile, with the completion of the Sellers play Clemens had flung
himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent
impetuosity than ever. Howells had hardly returned to Boston when he
wrote:

Now let's write a tragedy.

The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl
was a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. I read
the incident in Carlyle's Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my
note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene
of a possible tragedy, to see how it might work.

If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to
suit--hey? It's right in the big historical times--war; Cromwell in big,
picturesque power, and all that.

Come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. Curious, but didn't
Florence want a Cromwell? But Cromwell would not be the chief figure
here.

It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which
he would later make his story, "The Death Disc." Howells was too tired
and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so
Clemens went steaming a