December 12 Monday – In Florence Sam wrote to Frederick J. Hall, having received the November check . He advised of his loaning “The Californian’s Tale” to Arthur G. Stedman, and wrote he’d finished “Those Extraordinary Twins” (PW) some 60 or 80,000 words — he hadn’t yet counted. Still he had to do a bit of revision:

The last third of it suits me to a dot. I begin, to-day, to entirely re-cast and re-write the first two-thirds — new plan, with two minor characters made very prominent, one major character dropped out, & the Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.

The minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the story after him — “Pudd’nhead Wilson”

Sam also wrote he preferred £1,000,000 Bank Note & Other Stories as the title for the new collection, but granted he preferred Hall’s judgment over his own. “I mean this — is not taffy” [MTLTP 328].

Note: Messent argues “It is clear that the various problems pressing in on Twain at this time were affecting all aspects of his self-belief” [Short Works 117]. Though this may be true, it should be remembered that Sam, as is the case with most good writers, seldom was fully objective about his own work or judgment about such matters. Indeed, Sam thought 1,002 Nights to be equal or better than HF; he also sent a sketch, “Fable for Old Boys & Girls” along with “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It” — Howells rejecting the former and praising the latter, while Sam was convinced the rejected story was the better of the two. There were many such instances of this truism about a writer’s blindness in Sam’s life.