September 4 Sunday – In Bad Nauheim Sam began a letter to Frederick J. Hall that he finished the next day. Sam discussed page rates by Harper’s and compared his pay to Charles Dudley Warner’s. He counted his work as worth double Warner’s, and expected Hall to use that idea in negotiating rates. By this letter he’d settled on the title of Tom Sawyer Abroad, and had finished “Part I — In the Great Sahara”, about 40,000 words. He also announced another book in the works:

My family (tough people to please), like it first-rate, but they say it is for boys & girls. They won’t allow it to go into a grown-folks’ magazine. Don’t forget that detail.

By & by I shall have to offer (for grown-folks’ magazine,) a novel. Title —

Those Extraordinary Twins.

It is the howling farce I told you I had begun a while back. I laid it aside to ferment while I wrote “Tom Sawyer Abroad,” but I took it up again on a little different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now. I have written about 20,000 words on it, but I can’t form any idea of how big a book it is going to make yet. If I keep up my like it will be a book that will sell mighty well, I am sure of that. I think all sorts of folks will read it. It is clear out of the common order — it is a fresh idea — I don’t think it resembles anything in literature. I believe there’s a “boom” in it.

Sam suggested Hall see Mary Mapes Dodge again, of St. Nicholas, if Harper’s passed on the Tom Sawyer book; he suggested Howells might want the “Twins” book at $150 or $200 per 1,000 words [MTP].