Have a good time--and take an old man's blessing. MARK TWAIN.
A few days later he was writing to H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who had invited him for a visit in event of his coming to the Coast. Henry James had just been there for a week and it was hoped that Howells would soon follow.
To H. H. Bancroft, in San Francisco:
UP IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, May 27, 1905. DEAR MR. BANCROFT,--I thank you sincerely for the tempting hospitalities which you offer me, but I have to deny myself, for my wandering days are over, and it is my desire and purpose to sit by the fire the rest of my remnant of life and indulge myself with the pleasure and repose of work --work uninterrupted and unmarred by duties or excursions.
A man who like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next November has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does--that shameless old fictitious butter fly. (But if he comes, don't tell him I said it, for it would hurt him and I wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his indestructible youth, anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.) With thanks again, Sincerely yours, S. L. C.
Clemens found that the air of the New Hampshire hills agreed with him and stimulated him to work. He began an entirely new version of The Mysterious Stranger, of which he already had a bulky and nearly finished manuscript, written in Vienna. He wrote several hundred pages of an extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced (it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits), he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the previous summer at Tyringham. In a letter to Mr. Frederick A. Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary, written in '93, and originally published as a souvenir of Niagara Falls.
To Frederick A. Duneka, in New York:
DUBLIN, July 16, '05. DEAR MR. DUNEKA,--I wrote Eve's Diary, she using Adam's Diary as her (unwitting and unconscious) text, of course, since to use any other text would have been an imbecility--then I took Adam's Diary and read it. It turned my stomach. It was not literature; yet it had been literature once--before I sold it to be degraded to an advertisement of the Buffalo Fair. I was going to write and ask you to melt the plates and put it out of print.
But this morning I examined it without temper, and saw that if I abolished the advertisement it would be literature again.
So I have done it. I have struck out 700 words and inserted 5 MS pages of new matter (650 words), and now Adam's Diary is dam good--sixty times as good as it ever was before.
I believe it is as good as Eve's Diary now--no, it's not quite that good, I guess, but it is good enough to go in the same cover with Eve's. I'm sure of that.
I hate to have the old Adam go out any more--don't put it on the presses again, let's put the new one in place of it; and next Xmas, let us bind Adam and Eve in one cover. They score points against each other--so, if not bound together, some of the points would not be perceived.....
P. S. Please send another Adam's Diary, so that I can make 2 revised copies. Eve's Diary is Eve's love-Story, but we will not name it that. Yrs ever, MARK.
The peace-making at Portsmouth between Japan and Russia was not satisfactory to Mark Twain, who had fondly hoped there would be no peace until, as he said, "Russian liberty was safe.