rstand him and be honored by his confidence. In one letter of that
year he said:

I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one.
There was bile in me. I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow. If I
tried to empty it into the North American Review--oh, well, I couldn't
afford the risk. No, the certainty! The certainty that I wouldn't be
satisfied with the result; so I would burn it, & try again to-morrow;
burn that and try again the next day. It happens so nearly every time. I
have a family to support, & I can't afford this kind of dissipation. Last
winter when I was sick I wrote a magazine article three times before I
got it to suit me. I Put $500 worth of work on it every day for ten
days, & at last when I got it to suit me it contained but 3,000
words-$900. I burned it & said I would reform.

And I have reformed. I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to
where I can't stand it, but I can work it off on you economically,
because I don't have to make it suit me. It may not suit you, but that
isn't any matter; I'm not writing it for that. I have used you as an
equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I
guess. I would like to use Mr. Rogers, & he is plenty good-natured
enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my
leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable
bile-irruptions besides; I can't use Howells, he is busy & old & lazy, &
won't stand it; I dasn't use Clara, there's things I have to say which
she wouldn't put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. And
so--you're It.

[See the preface to the "Autobiography of Mark Twain": 'I am writing
from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately
frank. He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the
grave or out of it.' D.W.]

CCXXXV

A SUMMER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hampshire, the home of
Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope. It was in a
lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people,
and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends.
Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the painter,
and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family, and many
more.

Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news
got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, sai