SAM.

This is the last personal letter written during that famous first
sea-gipsying, and reading it our regret grows that he did not put
something of his Spanish excursion into his book. He never returned
to Spain, and he never wrote of it. Only the barest mention of
"seven beautiful days" is found in The Innocents Abroad.




VIII.

LETTERS 1867-68. WASHINGTON AND SAN FRANCISCO. THE PROPOSED BOOK OF
TRAVEL. A NEW LECTURE

From Mark Twain's home letters we get several important side-lights
on this first famous book. We learn, for in stance, that it was he
who drafted the ship address to the Emperor--the opening lines of
which became so wearisome when repeated by the sailors.
Furthermore, we learn something of the scope and extent of his
newspaper correspondence, which must have kept him furiously busy,
done as it was in the midst of super-heated and continuous
sight-seeing. He wrote fifty three letters to the Alta-California,
six to the New York Tribune, and at least two to the New York
Herald more than sixty, all told, of an average, length of three to
four thousand words each. Mark Twain always claimed to be a lazy
man, and certainly he was likely to avoid an undertaking not suited
to his gifts, but he had energy in abundance for work in his chosen
field. To have piled up a correspondence of that size in the time,