 Section 30 of Mark Twain of Biography, by Albert Bigelow Payne, Chapter 241, Gorky, Howells, and Mark Twain. Clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-making that had claimed him on his return from England five years before. He made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be called upon for remarks. He fell out of the habit of preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him confidence for his departure from his earlier method. There was seldom an afternoon or evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report of his doings. Once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had become the bell of New York. But he was something further. An editorial in the evening mail said, Mark Twain, in his last and best of life for which the first was made, seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American metropolis, an Aristides for justness and boldness, as well as incessancy of opinion, a Solon for wisdom and cogency, and a Themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of his person. Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. If he gains to make a public appearance, there is a throng at the doors which overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. We must be glad that we have a public commentator like Mark Twain always at hand, and his wit and wisdom continually on tap. His sound, breezy Mississippi Valley Americanism is a corrective to all sorts of snobbery. He cultivates respect for human rights by always making sure that he has his own. He talked one afternoon to the Barnard Girls, and another afternoon to the Women's University Club, illustrating his talk with what purported to be moral tales. He spoke at a dinner given to City Tax Commissioner Mr. Charles Putzel, and when he was introduced there as the man who had said, when in doubt tell the truth, he replied that he had invented that maxim for others, and that, when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity. The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor, but he made them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and searching satire in the body of what he said. It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark Twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center of news. Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals. The incident had begun in November of the previous year. One of the librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the decree, wrote privately of the matter. Clemens had replied, Dear sir, I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience. And to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through, before I was fifteen years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave. Ask that young lady. She will tell you so. Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's character, since you wish it, but really in my opinion it is no better than those of Solomon, David, and the rest of the sacred brotherhood. If there is an unexpurgated in the children's department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom and Huck from that questionable companionship? Sincerely yours, S. L. Clemens. I shall not show your letter to any one. It is safe with me." Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out. It has been supplied to the writer by Mr. Dickinson and is published here with his consent. One of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theatre-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the following march. The tip was sufficient. Telephone bells began to jingle and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark Twain's doorsteps. At 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America but in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and Clemens replied, Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove. The newspaper boys want that letter. Don't you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and I'll take care of this end of the line. In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds, There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion. He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliography, and was perhaps irreverent, but anyone who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck's soul in regard to the betrayal of Jim will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling. The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming, but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist Jankowski as a sort of advance agent for Gorky had already called upon Clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission. He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. Howells, too, was of this opinion. In his account of the episode he says, I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high. Clemens' interest, however, grew. He attended a dinner given to Gorky at the A-Club, number three, Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners. Also he wrote a letter to be read by Jankowski out of meeting held at the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia's wrongs. The letter ran, Dear Mr. Jankowski, my sympathies are with the Russian Revolution, of course. It goes without saying. I hope it will succeed. Now that I have talked with you, I take heart to believe it will. Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones, and its idle and vicious kin, has been born quite long enough in Russia, I should think, and it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it, and set up the Republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when Tsars and Grand Dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven. Most sincerely yours, Mark Twain. Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a literary dinner to be given in his honour. The movement was really assuming considerable proportions when suddenly something happened which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously. Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue one afternoon, I met Howells coming out. I thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. I went up to the study and, on opening the door, I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers pacing up and down rather fiercely. He turned, inquiringly, as I entered. I had clipped a cartoon from a morning paper which pictured him as upsetting the Tsar's throne, the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. I said, Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens. He shook his head violently. No! I can't see anything, now! And in another moment had disappeared into his own room. Something extraordinary had happened. I wondered if, after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled. I was naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. By and by I went down on the street where the news boys were calling extras. When I had bought one and glanced at the first page, I knew. Gorky had been expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife, a woman not so recognized by the American laws. Madame Andreva, a Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected. But it was not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in that way. Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens, and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the dinner. Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreva were evicted from a procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the headlines. An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells. The Russian Revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest. Howells came again, the reporters following and standing guard at the door below. In my Mark Twain he says, That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano, which was every now and then blowing a cone off, as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market and Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people. And we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The Forbidden Butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens. How many, he demanded. Five, the Butler faltered. Reporters, the Butler feigned uncertainty. What would you do, he asked me. I wouldn't see them, I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their veracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky, but the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine humor next morning. It was before dictation time, and he came drifting into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the impossibility of its being given now. Then he said, American public opinion is a delicate fabric. It shrivels like the webs of mourning at the lightest touch. Later in the day he made this memorandum. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty, no matter it will be inflicted just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do. Find out what the country's customs are, and refrain from offending against them. The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them. But I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom. It is built of brass. Boiler iron. Granite. Facts, seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar. To Dan Beard he said, Gorky made an awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here in his shirt-tail. The Gorky disturbance had already begun to subside when there came another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. On the afternoon of the eighteenth of April I heard, at the players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great earthquake was going on in San Francisco. Half an hour later, perhaps, I met Clemens coming out of number twenty-one. He asked, Have you heard the news about San Francisco? I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake, and had seen an extra with big scareheads. But I suppose the matter was exaggerated. No, he said, I am afraid it isn't. We have just had a telephone message that it is even worse than at first reported. A great fire is consuming the city. Come along to the newsstand, and we'll see if there is a later addition. We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, and got some fresh extras. The news was indeed worse than at first reported. San Francisco was going to destruction. Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. He spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in the perishing city. CHAPTER 242 MARK TWAIN'S GOODBYE TO THE PLATFORM It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that Mark Twain gave a farewell lecture at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Some weeks earlier General Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand dollars for a Mark Twain lecture. But Clemens had replied that he was permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience that had to pay to hear him. I always expect to talk, as long as I can get people to listen to me, he said, but I never again expect to charge for it. Later came one of his inspirations, and he wrote, I will lecture for one thousand dollars on one condition, that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton Association. It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices Mark Twain's farewell lecture were published without delay. I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called. Clemens came into the study where I was working. He often wandered in and out, sometimes without word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning things in general. But this time he suddenly chilled me by saying, I'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on the stage and help me. I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect, then he said, I am going to lecture on Fulton, on the story of his achievements. It will be a burlesque, of course, and I am going to pretend to forget my facts, and I want you to sit there in a chair. Now and then, when I seem to get stuck, I'll lean over and pretend to ask you something, and I want you to pretend to prompt me. You don't need to laugh or to pretend to be assisting in the performance any more than just that. Mark Twain will deliver his Farewell Lecture, Carnegie Hall, April 19, 1906, for the benefit of Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Military organization, Old Guard in full dress uniform will be present. Music by Old Guard Band. Tickets and boxes on sale at Carnegie Hall and Waldorf Historia. Seats, a dollar for fifty, one dollar, fifty cents. It was not likely that I should laugh. I had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth. It did not, for the moment, occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment to my immeasurable relief. It was a magnificent occasion, that spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levy of foremost citizens of the Republic. The band played America, as Mark Twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome. Some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in San Francisco forty years before when his fortunes had hung in the balance. Perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it. At all events he did a different thing. He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood. Ben followed his far sical history of Fulton with General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world, retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands. I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think few took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied, I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen minutes. Sometimes I can do it in an hour. There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remote corners. It did not matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers. Merely to see Mark Twain in his old age and in that splendid setting relating them was enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career. End of Chapter 242 Mark Twain's Good-Bye to the Platform. Read by John Greenman. Section 32 of Mark Twain a Biography. Part 1, 1900 to 1907. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain a Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne. Chapter 243. An Investment in Reading. Many of the less important happenings that seem worth remembering now, among them was the sale at the Nast auction of the Mark Twain letters already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant, and even Lincoln items were sold. But the Mark Twain letters led the list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens Nast letters brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief. It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he heard of it, said, I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this country. But it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes to letter writing, he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That forty-three dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars, after I'm dead. The perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the Secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see a great many of what might be called the milder type of person, who were evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these there came, one day, a very gentle spoken woman, who had promised that she would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she might sit face to face with a great man. It was in the morning hour before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his beautiful dressing-robe, and propped against his pillows. She kept her contract to the letter. But when she rose to go, she said, in a voice of deepest reverence, May I kiss your hand? It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous. Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small, exquisite hand it was, with a gentle dignity and poise of a king, and she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as she went, she said, How God must love you! I hope so! he said softly, and he did not even smile. But after she had gone he could not help saying in a quaint, half-pathetic voice, I guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations. Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous mornings, he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was, the king of a realm without national boundaries. Some of those nearest to him fell naturally into the habit of referring to him as the king, and in time the title crept out of the immediate household, and was taken up by others who loved him. He had been more than once photographed in his bed, but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time with little chance to study his natural attitudes. I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I obtained his permission to let me photograph him, a permission he seldom denied to any one. We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. He was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives. I was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done. I think he expected very little from this amateur performance, but by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than I had hoped for. When I brought him the prince a few days later, he expressed pleasure, and asked, Why didn't you take more? Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction. It being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by Saroni, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since. Saroni was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when Ducilu brought over the first gorilla, he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. I said it was, and Saroni was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete. So he borrowed my overcoat, and put it on the gorilla, and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine. It turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine, but it's not my favorite. I have tried to get it suppressed. Mark Twain made his first investment in Reading that spring. I had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. I was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain and the beauty and the solubility of this situation. His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that I buy it for him, and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost. I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home, but he foresaw that such a site at no great distance from New York would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means. The purchase was made without difficulty, a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently, still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a home. He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. He craved the retirement of solitude, one not too far from the maelstrom, so that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. The country home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was already in the air. No one of the family had at this time seen the location. CHAPTER 244 Trates and Philosophies I brought to the dictation one morning the Omer Kayam card which Twitchell had written him so long ago. I had found it among the letters. It furnished him a subject for that morning. He said, How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omer Kayam. When that card arrived, I had already read the dozen quatrains or so in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of delight, which they occasioned. No poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. It is the only poem I have ever carried about with me. It has not been from, under my hand, all these years. He had no general fondness for poetry, but many poems appeal to him, and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. Once, during the dictation, some verses were sent up by a young authorus who was waiting below for his verdict. The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony. He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then, and said, Tell her she can read it. She has my permission. She may commit any crime she wishes in my name. It was urged that the verses were of High Merit and the author a very charming young lady. I am very glad, he said, and I am glad the Lord made her. I hope he will make some more just like her. I don't always approve of his handiwork, but in this case I do. Then suddenly he added, Well, let me see it. No time like the present to get rid of these things. He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine verses as I believe could not be improved upon. We were held breathless by his dramatic fervor and power. He returned a message to that young aspirant that must have made her heart sing. When the dictation had ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift. Yes, he said, It is a gift, I suppose, like spelling and punctuation and smoking. I seem to have inherited all those. Continuing he spoke of inherited traits in general. There was Page, he said, an ignorant man who could not make a machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one. But he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the world has ever known. He watched over the expert draftsmen and superintended the building of that marvel. Pratt and Whitney built it. But it was Page's machine, nevertheless, the child of his marvellous gift. We don't create any of our traits. We inherit all of them. They have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. Man is the last expression and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world. In these cases we can see that the several temperaments constitute a law of God, a command of God, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to that law is blameless. Man in his evolution inherited the whole sum of these numerous traits, and with each trait it's share of the law of God. He widely differs from them in this, that he possesses not a single characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. You can say the house fly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe the whole house fly tribe. You can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid, and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe. You can say the spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you describe the whole spider and tiger tribes. You can say the lamb is limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you describe all the lambs. There is hardly a creature that you cannot definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait, except man. Men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the house fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves like the fox and the blue jay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all frisky like the monkey. These things are all in him somewhere, and they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment. We describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him, or by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him, and accord him high merit for their possession. It is comical. He did not invent these things. He did not stock himself with them. God conferred them upon him in the first instant of creation. They constitute the law, and he could not escape obedience to the decree any more than Page could have built the typesetter he invented, or the Pratt and Whitney machinists could have invented the machine which they built. He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his words were slowly measured with varying pauses between them. He halted in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added, what an amusing creature the human being is. It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and personality of such talks as this, the delicacies of his speech and manner which carried an ineffable charm. It was difficult, indeed, to record the substance. I did not know shorthand, and I should not have taken notes at such times in any case. But I had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of phonographic faculty, though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections, or I would find among his papers, memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts, where he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them verbally. In these cases I have not hesitated to amend my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always lacking, and must be, the wonder of his personality. A number of dictations of this period were about Susie, her childhood, and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his chapters. More than once after such dictations he reproached himself bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. He consoled himself a little by saying that Susie had died at the right time in the flower of youth and happiness. But he blamed himself for the lack of those things which might have made her childhood still more bright. Once he spoke of the biography she had begun and added, Oh! I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl's work. If I had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her, and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me told in her own way year after year. If I had shown her that I cared, she might have gone on with it. We are always too busy for our children. We never give them the time nor the interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them. But the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly and throw it away on those who care for it so little. Then after a moment of silence, But we are repaid for it at last. There comes a time when we want their company and their interest. We want it more than anything in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago. There is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. There's is the praise we want, and the praise we are least likely to get. His moods of remorse seem to overwhelm him at times. He spoke of Henry's death and little Langdon's, and charged himself with both. He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens' life with privations, that the sorrow of Susie's death had hastened her own end. How darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy. But such moods were evanescent. He was oftener gay than somber. One morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how he had made a failure of storytelling at a party the night before. An artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most amusing thing in the world, but he had not been satisfied with it, and had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when he had concluded and expected applause only a sickening silence had followed. A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine, he said, And it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed an hour and a half. Then a lady said with evident feeling, Lord, how pathetic! For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains of my great deeps were broken up, and I reigned laughter for forty days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. By that time I realized it was my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos in order to magnify the humorous explosion at the end, but I had constructed such a fog of pathos that when I got to the humor you couldn't find it. He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps he did not think worthwhile to include in his dictations, and sometimes he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside or to outline some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested. Once when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start the back number which was to contain reprints of exciting events from history, newspaper gleanings, eyewitness narrations, which he said never lost their freshness of interest. He suddenly interrupted himself to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future, he to be its publisher and I its editor. I think I assented and the dictation proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently. He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom could find the one most needed. Once after a feverishly impatient search for a few moments he invited Miss Hobby to leave the room temporarily so, as he said, that he might swear. He got up and began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment. It was an enormously large bed and he began to disparage the size of it. One could lose a DOG in this bed, he declared. Finally I suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his hand. He did so and it proved to be the one he wanted. Its discovery was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to volume. Then he said, There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that. A moment later when Miss Hobby returned he was serene and happy again. He was usually gentle during the dictations and patient with those around him, remarkably so, I thought, as a rule. But there were moments that involved risk. He had requested me to interrupt his dictation at any time that I found him repeating or contradicting himself or mistating some fact known to me. At first I hesitated to do this and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. Then he was likely to say, Why didn't you stop me? Why did you let me go on making a jackass of myself when you could have saved me? So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning and nearly always stopped him at the time. But if it happened that I upset his thought, the thunderbolt was apt to fly. He would say, Now you've knocked everything out of my head. Then of course I would apologize and say I was sorry, which would rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. I became lightning-proof at last. Also I learned better to select the psychological moment for the correction. There was a humorous complexion to the dictations, which perhaps I have not conveyed to the reader at all. Humor was his natural breath and life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals. But poetry was there as well. His presence was full of it. The grandeur of his figure, the grace of his movement, the music of his measured speech. Sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. At such times he had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing gown around his wrist, regarding it intensely as it seemed. His hands were so fair and shapely, the palms and fingertips as pink as those of a child. Then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great white mane, his eyes half closed, yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his clenched fist lifted, or his index finger pointing, to give force and meaning to his words. I cannot recall the picture too often or remind myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and to hear him. I do not know why I have not said before that he smoked continually during these dictations, probably as an aid to thought, though he smoked at most other times for that matter. His cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco. But I had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one. They were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training in the printing office and on the river that had seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. Rich, admiring friends used to send him quantities of expensive imported cigars, but he seldom touched them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. Once, to a minister, he proposed to send him something very special. He wrote, I should accept your hospitable offer at once, but for the fact that I couldn't do it and remain honest. That is to say, if I allowed you to send me what you believed to be good cigars, it would distinctly mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do nothing of the kind. I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had sixty years' experience. No, that is not what I mean. I mean I know a bad cigar better than anybody else. I judge by the price only. If it costs above five cents, I know it to be either foreign or half foreign and unsmokable by me. I have many boxes of Havana cigars of all prices, from twenty cents apiece up to a dollar sixty-six apiece. I bought none of them. They were all presents. They are an accumulation of several years. I have never smoked one of them and never shall. I work them off on the visitor. You shall have a chance. When you come, he smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent, and once, when he had bought a new expensive English briar route, he regarded it doubtfully for a time and then handed it over to me, saying, I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me. I am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild. One day after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man was downstairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey de Pew was to resign his senatorial seat, and Mark Twain was to be nominated in his place. The fancy of this appealed to him, and the reporter was allowed to come up. He was a young man and seemed rather nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. His chief anxiety was apparently to have Mark Twain's comment on the matter. Clemens said very little at the time, he did not wish to be a senator, he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't think he would care for the job anyway. When the reporter was gone, however, certain humorous possibilities developed. The senatorship would be a stepping stone to the presidency, and with the combination of humorist, socialist, and peace patriot in the presidential chair, the nation could expect an interesting time. Nothing further came of the matter. There was no such report. The young newspaper man had invented the whole idea to get a story out of Mark Twain. The item, as printed next day, invited a good deal of comment, and Collier's weekly made it a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the place. If it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came. Sometimes he walked up Fifth Avenue, and I must admit that for a good while I could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness. For most people turned to look, though I was fully aware that I did not in the least come into their scope of vision. They saw only Mark Twain. The feeling was a more comfortable one at the players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. We sat at the round table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him. Once we went to the Music Master, that tender play of Charles Clines, given by that matchless interpreter David Wallfield, Clemens was fascinated and said more than once, It is as permanent as Rip Van Winkle. Warfield, like Jefferson, can go on playing it all his life. We went behind when it was over, and I could see that Warfield glowed with Mark Twain's unstinted approval. Later when I saw him at the players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so happy. There were some billiard games going on between the champions, Hoppy and Sutton, at the Madison Square Garden, and Clemens, with his eager fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. He did not like to go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him. Just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause. The players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot had been made. Then they caught the figure of Mark Twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction. The audience applauded again and waved their handkerchiefs. Such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen. Clemens had a great admiration for the young champion Hoppy, which the billiardists' extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his game with intense eagerness. When it was over the referee said a few words and invited Mark Twain to speak. He rose and told them a story, probably invented on the instant. He said, Once in Nevada I dropped into a billiard room casually, and picked up a cue and began to knock the balls around. The proprietor, who was a red-haired man with such hair as I have never seen anywhere except on a torch, asked me if I would like to play. I said yes, he said, Knock the balls around a little, and let me see how you can shoot. So I knocked them around and thought I was doing pretty well, when he said, That's all right, I'll play you left-handed. It hurt my pride, but I played him. We banked for the shot, and he won it. Then he commenced to play, and I commenced to chalk my cue to get ready to play. And he went on playing, and I went on chalking my cue, and he played, and I chalked all through that game. When he had run his string out, I said, That's wonderful, perfectly wonderful. If you can play that way left-handed, what could you do right-handed? Couldn't do anything, he said. I'm a left-handed man. How it delighted them. I think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season. A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire for the summer, this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a year before, the Copley Green Place being now occupied by its owner. End of Chapter 245, In the Days Round, read by John Greenman. CHAPTER 246 THE SECOND SUMMER AT DOUBLIN The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beach forest some two or three miles from Dublin just under Menadoc, a good way up the slope. It is a handsome, roomy frame-house and had a long, colonnaded veranda of overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet, lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains. All the handy work of God is there. I had seen these things in paintings, but had not dreamed that such a view really existed. The immediate foreground was a grassy slope with ancient blooming apple trees, and just at the right hand Menadoc rose superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever-deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end. It was a masterpiece of the greater mind and of the highest order perhaps, where it had in it nothing of the touch of man. A church-spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field or stone wall or cultivated land. It was lonely. It was unfriendly. It cared nothing whatever for humankind. It was as if God, after creating all the world, had wrought his master-work here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that he had forgotten to give it a soul. In a sense this was true, for he had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men. It lacked the human touch, the human interest, and I could never quite believe in its reality. The time of arrival heightened this first impression. It was mid-May, and the lilacs were prodigal in bloom, but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. It seemed a spectral place, a place of supernatural beauty. Warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. I believe Jean Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. Something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods. She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. She had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain side and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion. Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all. She was not yet strong, and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician's care. Ms. Hobby came, and on the twenty-first of May the dictations were resumed. We began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing. The absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. The feeling of the old luxury and richness was there. It was a summer furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery. I think I shall like it, he said, when I get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labelled, and I think we'll do our dictating out here, hereafter. It ought to be an inspiring place." So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background. During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon. When it stormed, we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blaze and logs, and at the other the orchestral, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. Sometimes when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world, a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. When the dictation finished early there would be music, the music that he loved most, Beethoven's symphonies, or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin. Schubert opus 142, number 2, Chopin opus 37, number 2. It is easy to understand that this carried one a removed father from the customary things of life. It was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. In my notes made from day to day I find that I have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy. I had lodgings in the village and drove out mornings for the dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons, for he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. There was a woods path to the Upton Place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. A part of the way was through such a growth of beach timber as I have never seen elsewhere, tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through. One found it easy to expect there story-book ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white paltries. Then came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume, and this led to a dim religious place, a natural cathedral, where the columns were stately pine trees, branching and meeting at the top, a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play. You crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees. The days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except as the summer deepened the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountainside. He sat more often now in a large rocking chair, and generally seemed to be looking through half-dosed lids toward the monadnock heights that were always changing in aspect, in color and in form, as clouds shapes drifted by or gathered in those lofty hollows. White and yellow butterflies hovered over the grass, and there were some curious large black ants, the largest I have ever seen and quite harmless, that would slip in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us. Now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies. On June 1 I find in my notebook this entry. Warm and pleasant, the dictation about Grant continues, a great privilege to hear this foremost man of letters review his associations with that foremost man of arms. He remains seated today, dressed in white, as usual, a large yellow pansy in his buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze. He wears his worn Morocco slippers with black hose, sits in the rocker, smoking and looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. He is speaking just now of a Grant dinner which he attended, where Depew spoke. One is impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to the war-torn veteran of a thousand dinners, the honored guest of many, an honored figure of all. Earlier when he had been chastising some old offender, he added, however, he's dead, and I forgive him. Then after a moment's reflection, no, strike that last sentence out. When we laughed, he added, we can't forgive him yet. A few days later, it was June 4, the day before the second anniversary of the death of Mrs. Clemens, we found him at first in excellent humor from the long dictation of the day before. Then his mind reverted to the tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. It was hard work. He walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost nothing. He gave it up at last, remarking, We will not work, to-morrow. So we went away. He did not dictate on the fifth or the sixth, but on the seventh he resumed the story of Mrs. Clemens' last days at Florence. The weather had changed, the sunlight and warmth had all gone, a chill penetrating mist was on the mountains, Menadnok was blotted out. We expected him to go to the fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in his mind. A black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders, which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. For two hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life of the woman he had loved. It is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation Clemens did very little literary work during these months. He had brought his manuscript trunk, as usual, thinking perhaps to finish the microbe story and other of the uncompleted things, but the dictation gave him sufficient mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his stock-and-trade, as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into autobiography. Among these were the notes of his trip down the Rhone, made in 1891, and the old Stormfield story, which he had been treasuring and suppressing so long. He wrote Howells in June, The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. With intervals I find that I've been at it, off and on, nearly two hours for one hundred and fifty-five days since January 9th. To be exact, I've dictated seventy-five hours in eighty days and loafed seventy-five days. I've added sixty thousand words in the month that I've been here, which indicates that I've dictated during twenty days of that time, forty hours at an average of one thousand five hundred words an hour. It's a plenty, and I'm satisfied. There's a good deal of fat I've dictated from January 9th, two hundred and ten thousand words, and the fat adds about fifty thousand more. The fat is old pigeon-holed things of the years gone by, which I, or editors, didn't dast to print. For instance, I am dumping in the little old book which I read to you in Hartford about thirty years ago, and which you said, publish, and ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction. He'll do it, Captain Stormfield's visit to heaven. It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't to see print until I am dead. Tomorrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns, burned alive if they venture to print it, this side of A.D. 2006, which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters if I live three or four years longer. The edition, A.D. 2006, will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around, taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited. The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was naturally one of religious heresies, a violent attack on the orthodox scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the constellations. Mark Twain once expressed himself concerning reverence and the lack of it. I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one person or another is always charging me with lack of reverence. Reverence for what? For whom? Who is to decide what ought to command my reverence? My neighbor or I? I think I ought to do the electing myself. The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed. It is his privilege. The Christian doesn't. Apparently that is his privilege. The account is square enough. They haven't any right to complain of the other. Yet they do complain of each other. And that is where the unfairness comes in. Each says that the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken. For manifestly you can't have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. If you could do that, you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles, and get a reputation. He was not reading many books at this time. He was inclined rather to be lazy, as he said, and to loathe during the afternoons. But I remember that he read aloud, after the wedding, and the mother, those two beautiful word-pictures by Howells, which he declared sounded the depths of humanity with a deep sea lead. Also he read a book by William Allen White, in Our Town, a collection of tales that he found most admirable. I think he took the trouble to send White a personal handwritten letter concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as he said, to loathe the use of the pen. There were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did not often leave the house. Once at least he assisted in an afternoon entertainment at the Dublin Club, where he introduced his invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its demonstration by George de Forest Brush and Joseph Lindon Smith, to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. The art consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes, and a set formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject. Twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades, and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the Hartford days. Sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk, but these things were seldom. Now and then during the summer he made a trip to New York of a semi-business nature, partly going by the way of Fairhaven, where he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in Mr. Rogers' yacht. Once they made a cruise of considerable length to Bar Harbor and elsewhere. Here is an amusing letter which he wrote to Mrs. Rogers after such a visit. Dear Mrs. Rogers, in packing my things in your house yesterday morning, I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around. I thinking about theology, and not noticing the way this family does in similar circumstances like these. Two books, Mr. Rogers' Brown Slippers, and a ham. I thought it was iron. It looks like one we used to have. I am very sorry it happened, but it shan't occur again, and don't you worry. He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb, and I will send some of the things back, anyway, if there is some that won't keep. In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In one of his dictations he said, The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine. Menadnok is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green. The lakes as intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remotor one than we have known before. For beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture, rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes. But there is a defect, only one, but it is a defect which almost entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor. He lives within two miles of us except Franklin McVeigh, and he is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe. I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am existing, broken-hearted, in a garden of Eden. The garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change. Anything for society. I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it, a compact and visible allegory of it, furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone on this veranda in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as brick-a-brack. Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me. This was no more than a mood, though real enough while it lasted, somber and, in its way, regal. It was the loneliness of a king, King Lear, yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence. It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda where his figure had become so familiar. He had determined to have his hair cut when he reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this happened. When the proofs came, seven of them, he arranged them as a series to illustrate what he called the progress of a moral purpose. He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each photograph numbering them from one to seven, laying each set in a sheet of letter paper which formed a sort of wrapper on which was written. This series of seven photographs registers with scientific precision, stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the mind of the human race's oldest friend, S. L. C. He added a personal inscription and sent one to each of his more intimate friends. One of the pictures amused him more than the others, because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into it and paused near his foot. He had never outgrown his love for cats, and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a neighbour. He didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay sufficiently to ensure their subsequent care. These kittens he called sackcloth and ashes, ashes being the joint name of the two that looked exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. Their gambles always amused him, he would stop any time in the midst of dictation to enjoy them. Once, as he was about to enter the screen door that led into the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting. With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow and stepped back and said, Walk in, gentlemen, I always give precedence to royalty. And the kittens marched in, tails in air. All summer long they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and butterflies down the clover slope. It was a never-ending amusement to him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it, and tumble back and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of disappointment and disgust. I remember once when he was walking up and down discussing some very serious subject and one of the kittens was lying on the veranda asleep. A butterfly came drifting along, three feet or so above the floor. The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect out of the corner of its eye and perhaps did not altogether realize its action. At all events it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. Then it sprang to its feet and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away. Plemons had seen the performance and it completely took his subject out of his mind. He laughed extravagantly and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies. In that remote solitude there was one important advantage. There was no procession of human beings with axes to grind and few curious callers. Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened to seldom to annoy him. Even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission an appointment. Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough. When the British Premier, Campbell Bannerman, celebrated his 70th birthday, the London Tribune and the New York Herald requested a tribute. He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very old friend. He had known him first at Marienbad in 91 and in Vienna in 98, in daily intercourse when they had lived at the same hotel. His tribute ran to his Excellency the British Premier. Congratulations, not condolences! Before 70 we are merely respected at best and we have to behave all the time or we lose that asset. But after 70 we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered and don't have to behave unless we want to. When I first knew you, honoured sir, one of us was hardly even respected. Mark Dwayne. He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it. Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. One day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household. He was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations. After reading them aloud with great effect, to tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy. But his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion and a little later he incorporated one of the Jenny Allen letters in a speech which he made at a press club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified spelling, offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas. The letters in the end proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form. Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. He even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher and wrote to Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents, Dear Miss Stockbridge, if she really exists, 257 Benefit Street, if there is any such place. Yes, I should like a copy of that other letter. This whole fake is delightful, and I tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself, and that I am your guileless prey. But never mind, it isn't any matter. Now, as to publication, he set forth his views and promised his assistants when enough of the letters should be completed. Clemens allowed his name to be included with a list of spelling reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or writing. His interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its favor. His own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all so that each letter or character should have one sound and one sound only, and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand. He wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. Once he said, Our alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any large word in the English language with any degree of certainty. Its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. English orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as much. He would naturally favor simplicity in anything. I remember him reading as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, and his verdict, that is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English and written when we had no vocabulary. A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap. It is indeed. Still, I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles as if looking about him for the precise term. He would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. Mark Twain's English always focused exactly. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain A Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne Chapter 248 What Is Man? and The Autobiography Clemens decided to publish, anonymously, or rather to print privately, The Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before, and added to from time to time. He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the Devon Press was engaged to do the work. The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the superintendent of the Devon Company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on handmade paper to be gradually distributed to intimate friends. In an introductory word, dated February 1905, the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. He probably referred to the Monday Evening Club essay What Is Happiness, February 1883, C. Chapter 141. A number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. It was not over-favorably received. It was generally characterized as a clever and even brilliant expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. The supremacy of self-interest and man, the irresponsible machine, are the main features of What Is Man, and both of these, and all the rest, are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life sequence which began with the first created spark. There can be no training of the ideals, upward and still upward, no selfishness and unsophishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion, once admitting the postulate that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree. It was selected for him with his disposition in that first instant of created life. Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to surround everything like the sky, he answered, yes, like the sky, you can't break through anywhere. Colonel Harvey came to double in that summer and persuaded Clemens to let him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the North American review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. The matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well as in that long deferred period for which it was planned. Colonel Harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out. It may be said that most of the chapters were delightful enough, though, had it been possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications might have been avoided. It does not matter now, and it was not a matter of very wide import then. The payment of these chapters netted Clemens thirty thousand dollars, a comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the property at Redding. He engaged John Mead Howells to prepare some preliminary plans. Clara Clemens at Norfolk was written to of the matter. A little later I joined her in Redding, and she was the first of the family to see that beautiful hilltop. She was well pleased with the situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand. Clemens wrote Howells that he proposed to call it Autobiography House, as it was to be built out of the review money. And he said, If you will build on my farm and live there, it will set Mrs. Howells' health up for sure. Come, and I'll sell you the site for twenty-five dollars. John will tell you it is a choice place. The unusual summer was near its close. In my notebook under date of September 16 appears this entry. Windy in valleys, but not cold. This veranda is protected. It is peaceful here and perfect. But we are at the summer's end. This is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days later. I do not remember the date of the return to New York, and apparently I made no record of it. But I do not think it could have been later than the twentieth. It had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvellous summer, such as I would hardly know again. When I think of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless, slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech, always deliberate, save at rare intervals, always impressive, whatever the subject might be, whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of humankind.