The end of January saw the payment of the last of Mark Twain's debts. Once more he stood free before the world--a world that sounded his praises. The latter fact rather amused him. “Honest men must be pretty scarce,” he said, “when they make so much fuss over even a defective specimen.” When the end was in sight Clemens wrote the news to Howells in a letter as full of sadness as of triumph. ***** To W. D. Howells, in New York: HOTEL METROPOLE, VIENNA, Jan. 22, '98. DEAR HOWELLS,--Look at those ghastly figures. I used to write it “Hartford, 1871.” There was no Susy then--there is no Susy now. And how much lies between--one long lovely stretch of scented fields, and meadows, and shady woodlands, and suddenly Sahara! You speak of the glorious days of that old time--and they were. It is my quarrel--that traps like that are set. Susy and Winnie given us, in miserable sport, and then taken away. About the last time I saw you I described to you the culminating disaster in a book I was going to write (and will yet, when the stroke is further away)--a man's dead daughter brought to him when he had been through all other possible misfortunes--and I said it couldn't be done as it ought to be done except by a man who had lived it--it must be written with the blood out of a man's heart. I couldn't know, then, how soon I was to be made competent. I have thought of it many a time since. If you were here I think we could cry down each other's necks, as in your dream. For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around, now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in eclipse.