In the picture of me in the study you glimpse (through the left-hand window) the little rock bluff that rises behind the pond, and the bases of the little trees on top of it.The small square window is over the fireplace; the chimney divides to make room for it.Without the stereoscope it looks like a framed picture.All the study windows have Venetian blinds; they long ago went out of fashion in America but they have not been replaced with anything half as good yet.
The study is built on top of a tumbled rock-heap that has morning-glories climbing about it and a stone stairway leading down through and dividing it.
There now--if you have not time to read all this, turn it over to "Jock"and drag in the judge to help.
Mrs.Clemens must put in a late picture of Susie--a picture which she maintains is good, but which I think is slander on the child.
We revisit the Rutland Street home many a time in fancy, for we hold every individual in it in happy and grateful memory.
Goodbye, Your friend, SAML.L.CLEMENS.
P.S.--I gave the P.O.Department a blast in the papers about sending misdirected letters of mine back to the writers for reshipment, and got a blast in return, through a New York daily, from the New York postmaster.
But I notice that misdirected letters find me, now, without any unnecessary fooling around.
The new house in Hartford was now ready to be occupied, and in a letter to Howells, written a little more than a fortnight after the foregoing, we find them located in "part" of it.But what seems more interesting is that paragraph of the letter which speaks of close friendly relations still existing with the Warners, in that it refutes a report current at this time that there was a break between Clemens and Warner over the rights in the Sellers play.There was, in fact, no such rupture.Warner, realizing that he had no hand in the character of Sellers, and no share in the work of dramatization, generously yielded all claim to any part of the returns.
To W.D.Howells, in Boston:
FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, Sept.20, 1876.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,-- All right, my boy, send proof sheets here.I amend dialect stuff by talking and talking and talking it till it sounds right-and I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says "goin" and sometimes "gwyne," and they make just such discrepancies in other words--and when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer's carelessness.But I want to work at the proofs and get the dialect as nearly right as possible.
We are in part of the new house.Goodness knows when we'll get in the rest of it--full of workmen yet.
I worked a month at my play, and launched it in New York last Wednesday.
I believe it will go.The newspapers have been complimentary.It is simply a setting for the one character, Col.Sellers--as a play I guess it will not bear a critical assault in force.
The Warners are as charming as ever.They go shortly to the devil for a year--(which is but a poetical way of saying they are going to afflict themselves with the unsurpassable--(bad word) of travel for a spell.)I believe they mean to go and see you, first-so they mean to start from heaven to the other place; not from earth.How is that?
I think that is no slouch of a compliment--kind of a dim religious light about it.I enjoy that sort of thing.
Yrs ever MARK.
Raymond, in a letter to the Sun, stated that not "one line" of the California dramatization had been used by Mark Twain, "except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age." Clemens himself, in a statement that he wrote for the Hartford Post, but suppressed, probably at the request of his wife, gave a full history of the play's origin, a matter of slight interest to-day.
Sellers on the stage proved a great success.The play had no special merit as a literary composition, but the character of Sellers delighted the public, and both author and actor were richly repaid for their entertainment.
