“I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave you for one day.'”
But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held out inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there during February. Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his tormentor:
“Why don't you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a lecture platform again after Thursday night.”
Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to welcome them.
In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was
constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.
Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors to prepare something which canvassers could handle.
“Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,” he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold right along, “just like the Bible.”
On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book which would sell straight along, like the Bible. It was to be called “Twelve Memorable Murders.” They had dreamed two or three fortunes by the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.
“We never killed a single soul,” Howells said once to the writer of this memoir.
Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He offered all sorts of inducements.