July 21 Saturday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Orion, Mollie and Jane Clemens, relating his current “booming” productivity at writing HF, and his new passion, the English history game, which began with pegs up the driveway in Elmira and was translated into an indoor board game:

Private.

DEAR MA & ORION & MOLLIE,—I don’t know that I have anything new to report, except that Livy is still gaining, & all the rest of us flourishing. I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way. I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 7 years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.

Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day. So I did it, & took the open air. Then I struck an idea for the instruction of the children, & went to work & carried it out. It took me all day. I measured off 817 feet of the road-way in our farm grounds, with a foot-rule, & then divided it up among the English reigns, from the Conqueror down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year. I whittled out a basket of little pegs & drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, & gave it that King’s name—thus:

[Sam drew a snake-like drawing beginning at year 1066 & ending at 1135 with some King’s names]

…

& in bed, last night, I invented a way to play it indoors—in a far more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates & events—on a cribbage board.

Hello, supper’s ready./ Love to all. / Good bye./SAML [MTLP 434-5].

Paine adds:

“Orion Clemens would naturally get excited over the idea of the game and its commercial possibilities. Not more so than his brother, however, who presently employed him to arrange a quantity of historical data which the game was to teach. For a season, indeed, interest in the game became a sort of midsummer madness which pervaded the two households, at Keokuk and at Quarry Farm. Howells wrote his approval of the idea of “learning history by the running foot,” which was a pun, even if unintentional, for in its out-door form it was a game of speed as well as knowledge.”

William B. Franklin for Colt’s Mfg. wrote asking for a copy for Gen. Wilson of “Mark Twain’s book printed for private circulation. I understand that it is ‘rich racy & rare’”—Likely 1601 [MTP].

Daniel Whitford for Alexander & Green wrote having rec’d Sam’s reply. Whitford thought Sam would have to be examined in the Duncan suit about the 23rd of August [MTP].