I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog. I love them as dearly as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it. Perhaps his best effort of late years is this:
“O soul, soul, soul of mine:
Soul, soul, soul of thine!
Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine,
And sing thy lauds in crystal wine!”
This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him.
But I must desist. There are drafts here, everywhere and my gout is something frightful. My left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder.
God be with you.
HARTFORD.
These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the upper portion of the city of Dublin.
One may imagine the joy of Howells and the others in this ludicrous
extravaganza, which could have been written by no one but Mark
Twain. It will hardly take rank as prophecy, though certainly true
forecast in it is not wholly lacking.
Clemens was now pretty well satisfied with his piloting story, but
he began to have doubts as to its title, “Old Times on the
Mississippi.” It seemed to commit him to too large an undertaking.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Dec. 3, 1874.