SETTIGNANO, FLORENCE. Oct. 22, '92.
DEAR SUE,--We are getting wonted. The open fires have driven away the
cold and the doubt, and now a cheery spirit pervades the place. Livy
and the Kings and Mademoiselle having been taking their tea a number of
times, lately, on the open terrace with the city and the hills and the
sunset for company. I stop work, a few minutes, as a rule, when the sun
gets down to the hilltops west of Florence, and join the tea-group to
wonder and exclaim. There is always some new miracle in the view, a new
and exquisite variation in the show, a variation which occurs every 15
minutes between dawn and night. Once early in the morning, a multitude
of white villas not before perceived, revealed themselves on the far
hills; then we recognized that all those great hills are snowed thick
with them, clear to the summit.
The variety of lovely effects, the infinitude of change, is something
not to be believed by any who has not seen it. No view that I am
acquainted with in the world is at all comparable to this for delicacy,
charm, exquisiteness, dainty coloring, and bewildering rapidity of
change. It keeps a person drunk with pleasure all the time. Sometimes
Florence ceases to be substantial, and becomes just a faint soft dream,
with domes and towers of air, and one is persuaded that he might blow it
away with a puff of his breath.
Livy is progressing admirably. This is just the place for her.
[Remainder missing.]
*****
To Fred J. Hall, in New York:
Dec. 12, '92.
DEAR MR. HALL,--November check received.
I have lent the Californian's Story to Arthur Stedman for his Author
Club Book, so your suggestion that my new spring-book bear that name
arrives too late, as he probably would not want us to use that story in
a book of ours until the Author book had had its run. That is for him to
decide--and I don't want him hampered at all in his decision. I, for my
part, prefer the “$1,000,000 Banknote and Other Stories” by Mark Twain
as a title, but above my judgment I prefer yours. I mean this--it is not
taffy.
I told Arthur to leave out the former squib or paragraph and use only
the Californian's Story. Tell him this is because I am going to use that
in the book I am now writing.
I finished “Those Extraordinary Twins” night before last makes 60 or
80,000 words--haven't counted.
The last third of it suits me to a dot. I begin, to-day, to entirely
recast and re-write the first two-thirds--new plan, with two minor
characters, made very prominent, one major character cropped out, and
the Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.
The minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the
story after him--“Puddn'head Wilson.”
Merry Xmas to you, and great prosperity and felicity!