"The fewer engagements I have from this time forth the better I
shall be pleased." By the end of February he was back in Hartford,
refusing an engagement in Boston, and announcing to Redpath, "If I
had another engagement I'd rot before I'd fill it." From which we
gather that he was not entirely happy in the lecture field.

As a matter of fact, Mark Twain loathed the continuous travel and
nightly drudgery of platform life. He was fond of entertaining, and
there were moments of triumph that repaid him for a good deal, but
the tyranny of a schedule and timetables was a constant
exasperation.

Meantime, Roughing It had appeared and was selling abundantly. Mark
Twain, free of debt, and in pleasant circumstances, felt that the
outlook was bright. It became even more so when, in March, the
second child, a little girl, Susy, was born, with no attending
misfortunes. But, then, in the early summer little Langdon died.
It was seldom, during all of Mark Twain's life, that he enjoyed more
than a brief period of unmixed happiness.

It was in June of that year that Clemens wrote his first letter to
William Dean Howells the first of several hundred that would follow
in the years to come, and has in it something that is characteristic
of nearly all the Clemens-Howells letters--a kind of tender
playfulness that answered to something in Howells's make-up, his
sense of humor, his wide knowledge of a humanity which he pictured
so amusingly to the world.


To William Dean Howells, in Boston: