He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hampshire, the home of
Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope. It was in a
lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people,
and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends.
Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the
painter, and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family,
and many more.
Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news
got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, said:
I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I
rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. I hope
for frequent intercourse between the two households. I shall have
my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from the rest-
cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we
shall not see her before autumn. We have not seen her since the
middle of October.
Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came
back charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there
is no lack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer and I were
shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago.
Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the
fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired
wanting for that man to get old.
They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer
colony which congregated there. There was much going to and fro
among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods,
mountain-climbing for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine,
unpretentious comradeship.
The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming
outlook. Clemens wrote to Twichell:
We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock. It
is a woody solitude. We have no near neighbors. We have neighbors
and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we
live on a hill. I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of
these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven
beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years' friendship. It is
the most remarkable thing I ever heard of.
This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has
turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript.. It was
a fantastic tale entitled “3,000 Years among the Microbes,” a sort of
scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that
had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment
transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to
turn him into a bird. His habitat was the person of a disreputable
tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething
microbic nations and fantastic life problems. It was a satire, of
course--Gulliver's Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic,
mathematical jamboree.
He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had
attained the proportions of a book of size. As a whole it would hardly
have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous
passages, and certainly not without interest. Its chief mission was to
divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he
would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For
extracts from “3,000 Years among the Microbes” see Appendix V, at the
end of this work.] MARK TWAIN'S SUGGESTED TITLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE
BOOK:
3000 YEARS
AMONG THE MICROBES