Dec 22d 1874

My dear Clemens:

When I subscribed to The Weekly Photograph I had some doubts as to whether I should get the numbers regularly. The police, you know, have a way of swooping down on that kind of publication. The other day they gobbled up an entire edition of The Life in New York. I trust that the Life of Hartford (or any other place he happens to be in) will not come to grief that way. . . . It is a good portrait. Looks like a man who has just thrown off an Epic in twelve books, for relaxation. I was glad to get the picture of where you live. It is apparently a comfortable little shanty. Cosy, and all that sort of thing. But you ought to see my Mansion at Ponkapog. It could n’t have cost less than $1500. to build. And then the land. Land at Ponkapog brings $25 per acre; but then real estate has gone up everywhere. The soil here is so light that it would go up of itself, if you let it alone. They have to put manure on it to keep it down. The house is furnished in a style of Oriental splendor. Straw-matting everywhere—even in the servants’ rooms, straw-matting. It’s as common with us as Turkey rugs and Wilton carpets in the homes of the poor. Of course you can’t have these things, but you are content. I like to see a man living within his means—and content.

That day after I left you, or you left me, or we left each other—I don’t know how to state the sorrowful occurrence correctly—I went and hunted up old Howells and carried him off with me to my suburban Palace. He wandered from room to room bewildered by the fluted pillars (on the beds!) and the gorgeous architecture of the coal bins. We wished for you, but that goes without saying. Howells got to laughing in the early part of the evening, did n’t let up at all, carried him off to bed at ½ past 11, still laughing—the same old laugh he had started at 7 o’clock. I woke up two or three times somewhere near daybreak, and he was a-going it!—My friend, you can afford to say that I didn’t make a three-ply donkey of myself at that dinner—you, who are bubbling over with after-dinner happinesses like a perpetual thermal spring. But I did. I had never made a speech. It was understood that I was not to be called upon, and when that cheerful old death’s head at the other end of the table sung out my name, “I wished I was dead”,—like Henry Ward Beecher. But I can make a speech, and a devilish good one, when there is n’t anybody around. I wish I had been prepared. I had two or three personal enemies at that festive board, old John Brown Sanborn, and that fellow Perrywinkle, who looks like a fugitive tape-worm—the cream-colored chap who got up in sections to reply to a toast and got all tangled in his inability. But this can’t interest you. If I were abusing some of your foes you’d take some interest in it.—I wish I had known that Mr Twichell cared for any of those verses; I would have liked to send him the book by your hands. I will yet, if you think it would please him. A man sent me a volume of poems the other day and I’ve been longing ever since to brain the author. I wouldn’t like to generate such a desire in your excellent friend, to whom my remembrances.

Mrs T B, who, I regret to say, is having a dreadful cold, sends her love to your wife. You need n’t try to get any of it away from her. We hope that you found the little one entirely well when you reached home, and were filled with regret that you did not stay over and spend the night with your faithful friends, the marquise and marquis of Ponkapog.