We are desperately glad you & your gang are home again—may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow. Charley Clark has gone to the other side for a run—will be back in August. He had been sick, & needed the trip very much.

Mrs. Clemens had a long & wasting spell of sickness last spring, & is still proportioned like the tongs, but she is pulling up, now, & by & by will get some cushions on her, I reckon. I hope so, anyway—it’s been like sleeping with a bed full of baskets. The children are booming, & my health is ridiculous, it’s so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports.

I haven’t piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm three weeks & a half ago. Why, it’s like old times, to step straight into the study, damp from the breakfast table, & sail right in & sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words. I wrote 4000 words to-day & I touch 3000 or & upwards pretty often, & don’t fall below 2600 on any working day. And when I get fagged out, I lie abed a couple of days & read & smoke, & then go it again for 6 or 7 days. I have finished one small book, & am away along in a big one that I half-finished two or three years ago. I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more. And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not. It’s a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer. There’s a raft episode from it in second or third chapter of Life on the Mississippi.

Day before yesterday I struck a dull place in my head, so I knocked off work, & mapped measured off the reigns of the English kings on our roadway, (a foot to the year,) from the Conqueror down, & drove a peg in the ground for each king—21 feet from the Conqueror to Rufus; 13 to Henry I; 35 to Stephen; 19 to Henry II; 35 to Richard; 10 to John; 17 to Henry III; 56 to Edward I—& so on. You get the idea?—so’t you can glance out over the grounds & see how much short or longer a king’s reign was, by the distance his peg is from the next one. My notion is, to get up an open-air game which shall put all these names & dates & statistics into the children’s heads without the bore of study. I got vastly interested in this nonsense, & after I went to bed last night I worked out a plan for p making it an indoor game also—play it with cards & a cribbage board. I’m booming, these days—got health & spirits to waste—got an overplus; & if I were at home, we would do write a play. But we must do it anyhow by & by.

We stay here till Sept. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck for sea air. Then home.

We ar are powerful glad you are all back; & send love according.