REDDING, CONN,
Oct. 28, '08.
DEAR MR. JACOBS,—It has a delightful look. I will not venture to say how delightful, because the words would sound extravagant, and would thereby lose some of their strength and to that degree misrepresent me. It is my conviction that Dialstone Lane holds the supremacy over all purely humorous books in our language, but I feel about Salthaven as the Cape Cod poet feels about Simon Hanks:
“The Lord knows all things, great and small,
With doubt he's not perplexed:
'Tis Him alone that knows it all
But Simon Hanks comes next.”
The poet was moved by envy and malice and jealousy, but I am not: I place Salthaven close up next to Dialstone because I think it has a fair and honest right to that high position. I have kept the other book moving; I shall begin to hand this one around now.
And many thanks to you for remembering me.
This house is out in the solitudes of the woods and the hills, an hour and a half from New York, and I mean to stay in it winter and summer the rest of my days. I beg you to come and help occupy it a few days the next time you visit the U.S.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
One of the attractions of Stormfield was a beautiful mantel in the
billiard room, presented by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee. It
had not arrived when the rest of the house was completed, but came
in time to be set in place early in the morning of the owner's
seventy-third birthday. It was made of a variety of Hawaiian woods,
and was the work of a native carver, F. M. Otremba. Clemens was
deeply touched by the offering from those “western isles”—the
memory of which was always so sweet to him.
To Mr. Wood, in Hawaii: