Elmira
Wednesday PM.
My Dear Howells:
It’s finished. I was misled by hurried mis-paging. There were ten pages of notes, & over 300 pages of MS when the play was done. Did it in 42 hours, by the clock; 40 pages of the Atlantic—but then of course it’s very “fat.” Those are the figures, but I don’t believe them myself, because the thing’s impossible.
But let that pass. All day long, & every day, since I finished (in the rough), I have been diligently, altering, amending, re-writing, cutting down. I finished finally to-day. Can’t think of anything else in the way of an improvement. I thought I would stick to it while the interest was hot—& I am mighty glad I did. A week from now it will be frozen—then, revising would be drudgery. (You see I learned something from the fatal blunder of putting Ah Sin aside before it was finished.)
She’s all right, now. She reads in 2 hours & 20 minutes & will play not longer than [2¾. ] ‸hours.‸ Nineteen characters; 3 acts; (I doubled one.) (I redu (I bunched 2 into 1.)
To-morrow I will draw up an exhaustive synopsis to insert in the printed title-page for coypyrighting, & then on Friday I go or Saturday I go to New York to remain a week or ten days & lay for an actor. Wish you could run down there & have a holiday. ’Twould be fun.
My wife won’t ‸have‸ b Balaam Ass; therefore I call the piece “Cap’n Simon Wheeler, The Amateur Detective.”
Yrs
Mark.
Copy-text:
