“Youth, let's walk a little,” she said.
The “Undertaker's Love Story” is still among the manuscripts of that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.—[This tale bears no relation to “The Undertaker's Story” in Sketches New and Old.]
The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. Clemens wrote Dr. Brown:
I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been
so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
mighty short in letter-writing....
On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
same thin linen we make shirts of.
He incloses some photographs in this letter.
The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in the
center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table waitress,
a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is
the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's
American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's
coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute
or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background,
under the archway, you glimpse my study.
The “new baby,” “Bay,” as they came to call her, was another little daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household. In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.
There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with
the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the
winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
look over the Modoc's head. The devotion of these vassals has been
purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.
There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells's “Foregone Conclusion” was running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. Clemens wrote the author:
I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures
of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.