There you stick, at Belmont, & now I’m going to Washington for a few days; & of course, between you & Providence that visit is going to get mixed, & you’ll have been here & gone again just about the time I get back. Bother it all, I wanted to astonish you with a chapter or two from Orion’s latest book—not the seventeen which he has begun in the last four months, but the one which he began last week.

Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, “George didn’t take the cat down to the cellar—Rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory.” So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat.) About 3 in the morning Mrs. C. woke me & said, “I do believe I hear that cat in the drawing-room—what did you do with him?” I answered up with the satisfaction confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, & said, “I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, & spread everything open, so that there wasn’t any obstruction between him & the cellar.” Language wasn’t capable of conveying this woman’s disgust. But the sense of what she said, was, “He couldn’t have done any harm in the conservatory—so you must go & make the entire house free to him & the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you, I should have admired but not been astonished, because I should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself, is what I cannot understand.”

So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.

Brisk times here. Saturday, these things happened: Our neighbor Chas. Smith was stricken with heart disease, & came near joining the majority; my publisher, Bliss, ditto ditto; a neighbor’s child died; neighbor Whitmore’s sixth child added to his other five other cases of measles; neighbor Niles sent for, & responded; Susie Warner down, abed; Mrs. George Warner threatened with death during several hours; her son Frank, whilst imitating the marvels of in Barnum’s circus bills, thrown from his aged horse & brought home insensible; Warner’s friend Max Yortzburgh, shot in the back by a locomotive & boroken into 32 distinct pieces & his life threatened; & Mrs. Clemens, after writing all these cheerful things to Clara Spaulding, taken at midnight, & if the doctor had not been pretty prompt the contemplated Clemens would have called before his apartments were ready.

However, everybody is all right, now, except Yortzburg, & he is mending—that is, he is being mended. I knocked off, during these stirring times, & don’t intend to go to work again till we go away for the summer, 5 or 6 weeks hence. So I am writing to you; not because I have anything to say, but because you don’t have to answer, & I need something to do, this afternoon.

The rightful earl has

Well, never mind about the rightful earl—he merely wanted to borrow money—I never knew an American earl that didn’t.

But Warner has just telephoned me about you. It is a great disappointment, but Mrs. Clemens says—& I repeat—that you are doing the right thing; when one is short for time, he should be free to alter arrangements with friends, without prejudice or cussedness (I wish in my heart she would drop that word)—& that it is hard enough that one can’t have the same righteous privilege with more distantly-related folk.

Well, we hope you will have a good time, & I wish I was going; but I have given it up. I have a letter from a Congressman this morning, & he says Congress couldn’t be persuaded to bother about Canadian pirates at a time like this when all legislation must have a political & Presidential bearing, else won’t go Congress won’t look at it. So I have changed my mind & my course; I go north, to kill a pirate. I must procure repose some way, else I cannot get down to work again.

Pray offer my approval most sincere & respectful approval to the President—is approval the proper word? I find it is the one I mostly value here in the household, & seldomest get.

With our affection to you both,