February 11 Friday — In Hamilton, Bermuda Sam wrote per Helen S. Allen to Albert B. Paine in Redding, Conn.
Dear Mr. Paine, / Mr. Clemens wants me to tell you that he approves of your project and also the terms [in SLC’s hand: suggested. /Helen.
P. S. The plan which would leave me 80 acres strikes me pleasantly.
I am afraid “The Mysterious Stranger’ is causing you trouble, Never mind don’t send it, I have no particular use for it here. And if it should start by express it would be old & stale & illegible ages before it reached me.
I will stop here in order that this letter may catch the mail / S, L. C. / Per Helen [MTP].
Albert Bigelow Paine wrote from Redding to Clemens:
Dear Mr. Clemens: / Yours with suggestions about the farm &c at hand, tonight. If the title is satisfactory you will have no further worry about the farm, for Lounsbury’s man came up today & I closed with him for $6000.00” giving him the house and about 40 acres, with a 230 foot strip of the meadow to the East, for a lawn, The extra strip contains about five acres, & the land (bought with your second purchase, in 1907) cost you $30.00 an acre. I thought $60, now, a fair price, to close the trade, & as you have plenty of meadow left I don’t think you will be sorry. The man’s name is Nash & he is, I think, a fine fellow. He has deposited $100.00 to bind the bargain & is ready to pay the rest as soon as the title is established. I suppose that part of it is all right, though as I did not buy this piece (the Italian farm, I mean) I have no personal knowledge in that direction.
Now, as to the household Economies, you will see by Mar. 1st, statement very soon that things are moving in the right direction. Katy & I have just been discussing plans &c. Katy Murray will do laundry & upstairs work, as soon as Mary the Cook returns, & we will get a cheap kitchen maid—at say $12 a month. Jennie & Annie will go then and while the money saving of that change will not be much it will provide a first class cook to be on hand when you or Clara come [MTP]. Note: Paine continued with various miscellaneous items relating to keeping the household, the livery expenses and other bills, a letter from Clara, and a final disposition of Claude who was with Clemens. Paine felt that Clemens could not maintain a more economical home than Stormfield. He also paid $17 taxes on the Mark Twain Company assessed at only $1000—“small enough,”
William Dean Howells wrote from NYC to Sam.
I have not got a Fairy Princess to take my profane and abusive dictation, and so I cannot reply to your praises of our favorite author in fit terms, but you will find my joy in Harben in an early number of the N. American. You seem to require a novelist to be true to the facts and if the facts are not pleasant, to be pleasant himself. hat seems rather difficult. You are the only man who can do it; but I believe you will end by liking poor old Harben as much as I do. He didn’t make North Georgia; he only made a likeness of it. Don’t shoot the artist.
I am glad you are out of this awful winter, where one spell of weather follows another like the rows of words in McGuffey’s spelling-book. We are just starting in for our third blizzard to-night. Pilla writes that it isn’t as tropical as it might be at Bermuda, but you haven’t got a snowstorm over your heads and under your feet. When I think of you at Stormfield I rejoice that you have a biographer to roost under your roof-tree for you.
I hear you want to see what I have written about my turning-point. Nothing but generous shame, and a wish to spare your feelings keeps me from sending you a letter which Duneka has just sent me about it. You will be brought low, soon enough.
I wonder if you have seen the autobiography of Stanley, the explorer. There is about the livest book I ever read, He starts in a Welsh workhouse, and he ends in such glory as few men ever won, and was then refused a grave in Westminster Abbey by a wretched, tyrannical parson. There is a lot about New Orleans in the middle ‘50s, and about Arkansas a little later which would make you feel at home.—I am slowly plowing through “Tristam Shandy.” How tough is the humor that out poor ancestors battened on! But I will read it. The “Sentimental Journey” is all right, though nasty.—But get the life of Stanley. He was a Southern prisoner in the Northern prison pen at Chicago. If Andersonville was intentionally worse—but it couldn’t be, / Yours ver / W. D. Howells [MTHHR 2: 852-3}. Notes: Howells referred to Helen S. Allen, Sam’s “Fairy Princess,” Evidently Clemens had ripped William Nathaniel Harben (1858-1919), author of The Woman Who Trusted (1901), Mam’ Linda (1907), and other novels about life in N. Georgia. See other notes in source; also Gribben on Harben 291. Howells had reviewed Harben in the Mar. 1910 issue of North American Review, See also MMT p.42.