Section 62 of Mark Twain, A Biography, Part II, 1907–1910. Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut Autumn. The change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain.  The window panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. The red tones that began to run through the foliage, the red berry bushes, the fading grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning, the background of distant blue hills and changing skies. These things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. He loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. If a friend came he was willing to walk much farther, and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the gorge. A romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring. But his footing was no longer sure, and he did not go far. He liked better to sit on the grass-grown rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. He liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. The marvels of science always appealed to him. He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that. He liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand Canyon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there during my western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. He said, I should enjoy that. But the railroad journey is so far, and I should have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things again. I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service so that he might travel in comfort, but he shook his head. That would only make me more conspicuous. How about a disguise? Yes, he said, I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name, but I couldn't disguise my drawing speech, and they'd find me out. It was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. His fame had deprived him of valued privileges. He talked of many things during these little excursions, once he told how he had successfully advised his nephew Moffat in the matter of obtaining a desirable position. Moffat had wanted to become a reporter. Clemens devised a characteristic scheme. He said, I will get you a place on any newspaper you may select, if you promise faithfully to follow out my instructions." The applicant agreed, eagerly enough. Clemens said, Go to the newspaper of your choice. Say that you are idle and want work, that you are pining for work, longing for it, that you ask no wages, and will support yourself. All that you ask is work, that you will do anything, sweep, fill the ink stands, mucilage bottles, run errands, and be generally useful. You must never ask for wages. You must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. You must work just as faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. Then see what happens. The scheme had worked perfectly. Young Moffat had followed his instructions to the letter. By and by he attracted attention. He was employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the confidence of the office. In obedience to further instructions he began to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk. No pay was asked, none was expected. Occasionally one of the items was used. Then, of course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he was given a small news assignment. There was no trouble about his progress after that. He had won the confidence of the management and shown that he was not afraid to work. The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed. The idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when Cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning. Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind. He thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy, that the signs were already evident. He referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston with its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Pongapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy. 97 also appendix M. He would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming. I'm not expecting it in my time, nor in my children's time, though it may be sooner than we think. There are two special reasons for it, and one condition. The first reason is that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey. A god and king, for example. The second reason is that, while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones, who have not. And the condition is vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions. He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy, that is to say a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a presidential succession. He did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently. He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently. The gospel of peace, he said, is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress, but always neglecting to furnish statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is a soldier camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II of Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch except Alexander VI, that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives and giving them nothing in return but salvation, and a home in heaven furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest. Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and incidentally a pagan now and then, and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom, is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it, the more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create. Once speaking of battles great and small and how important even a small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said, to him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big A. When to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. For instance, to the soldier of one battle, San Juan Hill, was an achievement with an A as big as the pyramids of chops. Whereas if Napoleon had fought it he would have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had happened. But that is all natural and human enough. We are all like that. The curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never fail to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. I remember one Sunday, when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade and fell to talking of Herod's slaughter of the innocence, which he said could not have happened. Tacitus makes no mention of it, he said, and he would hardly have overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like Herod. Just consider a little king of a corner of the Roman Empire ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of Roman subjects. Why, the emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and dismissed Herod. That tradition is probably about as authentic as those connected with a number of old bridges in Europe which are said to have been built by Satan. The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge.  That was for Satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time. Satan must have been pretty simple even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world. And besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if someone should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the standard oil company, with a gallon of kerosene. He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons always exactly on schedule time. The great law was a phrase often on his lips, the exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of color everywhere. These were for him outward manifestations of the great law, whose principle I understood to be unity, exact relations throughout all nature, and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for preservation, from everlasting to everlasting, this is the law. The sum of wrong and misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human blessedness. No civilization, no advance, has ever modified these proportions by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures. End of chapter 273, Stormfield Philosophies. Read by John Greenman. The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily. Clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone. Members of the Harper Company came to the fore and said, in the name of the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King, the King came up with their wives. Angelfish swam in and out of the aquarium. Bermuda friends came to see the new home. Robert Collier, the publisher and his wife, Mrs. Sally, as Clemens liked to call her, paid their visits. Lord Northcliff, who was visiting America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed with the architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country place he was about to build in Newfoundland. Helen Keller, with Mr. and Mrs. Macy, came up for a weekend visit. Mrs. Crane came over from Elmira, and, behold, one day came the long ago sweetheart of his childhood, little Laura Hawkins. Laura Fraser now, widowed and in the seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up. That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October. I've grown young in these months of dissipation here, and I have left off drinking. It isn't necessary now. Society and theology are sufficient for me." To Helen Allen, a Bermuda Angelfish, he wrote, We have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop. The moment I saw the house, I was glad I built it. And now I am gladder and gladder all the time. I was not dreaming of living here except in the summer time. That was before I saw this region and the house, you see. But that is all change now. I shall stay here winter and summer both, and not go back to New York at all. My child, it's as tranquil and contenting as Bermuda. You will be very welcome here, dear." He interested himself in the affairs and in the people of Reading. Not long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the countryside, neighbors of every quality for closer acquaintance, and threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house. He appointed Mrs. Lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide, a sort of committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome each visitor in person.  In the dining-room there were generous refreshments. Again not long afterward he issued a special invitation to all of those architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however great or small, in the building of his home. Mr. and Mrs. Littleton were visiting Stormfield at this time, and both Clemens and Littleton spoke to these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that their efforts had been worthwhile. Presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to much reading-matter. He had been for years flooded with books by authors and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city. When these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as the nucleus of a public library. An unused chapel not far away, it could be seen from one of his windows, was obtained for the purpose. Officers were elected, a librarian was appointed, and so the Mark Twain Library of Reading was duly established. Clemens himself was elected its first president, with the resident physician Dr. Ernest H. Smith, vice president, and another resident, William E. Grunman, librarian. On the afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address. He said, I am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow farmers. I suppose you are all farmers. I am going to put in a crop next year, when I have been here long enough and know how. I couldn't make a turnip stay on a tree now after I had grown it. I like to talk. It would take more than the redding air to make me keep still. And I like to instruct people. It's noble to be good, and it's nobler to teach others to be good and less trouble. I am glad to help this library. We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books, theoretically at least. Mr. Beard or Mr. Adams will give some land, and by and by we are going to have a building of our own. This statement was news to both Mr. Beard and Mr. Adams, and an inspiration of the moment. But Mr. Theodore Adams, who owned a most desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library purposes. Clemens continued, I am going to help build that library with contributions from my visitors. Every male guest who comes to my house will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage. A characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a dollar to the library building fund was later placed on the billiard room mantle at Stormfield with good results. If those burglars that broke into my house recently had done that, they would have been happier now, or if they'd have broken into this library, they would have read a few books and led a better life. Now they are in jail, and if they keep on, they will go to Congress. When a person starts downhill, you can never tell where he's going to stop. I am sorry for those burglars. They got nothing that they wanted, and scared away most of my servants. Now we are putting in a burglar alarm instead of a dog. Some advised the dog, but it costs even more to entertain a dog than a burglar. I am having the ground electrified, so that for a mile around, anyone who puts his foot across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in Europe. Now I will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know already, Dr. Smith. So a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and there was a feeling that Reading, besides having a literary colony, was to be literary, in fact. It might have been mentioned earlier that Reading already had literary associations when Mark Twain arrived. As far back as revolutionary days, Joel Barlow, a poet of distinction, and once minister to France, had been a resident of Reading, and there were still Barlow descendants in the township. William Edgar Grumman, a librarian, had written the story of Reading's share in the Revolutionary War. No small share, for General Israel Putnam's army, had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter. Charles Burr Todd, of one of the oldest Reading families himself, still a resident, was also the author of a Reading history. Of literary folk not native to Reading, Dora Reed Goodall and her sister Elaine, the wife of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, had long been residents of Reading's center. Jeanette L. Gilder and Ida M. Tarble had summer homes on Reading Ridge. Dan Beard, as already mentioned, owned a place near the banks of the Sogetuck, while Kate V. St. Mauer, also two of Nathaniel Hawthorne's granddaughters, had recently located adjoining the Stormfield lands, by which it will be seen that Reading was in no way unsuitable as a home for Mark Twain. End of Chapter 274. Citizen and Farmer. Read by John Greenman. Section 64 of Mark Twain, A Biography. Part II. 1907-1910. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain, A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Payne. Chapter 275. A Mantle and a Baby Elephant. Mark Twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year. The first of these, A Mantle, from Hawaii, presented to him by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee, was set in place in the billiard room on the morning of his seventy-third birthday. This committee had written, proposing to build for his new home either a mantle or a chair, as he might prefer, the same to be carved from the native woods. Clemens decided on a billiard room mantle, and John howls forward to the proper measurements. So in due time the mantle arrived, a beautiful piece of work and in fine condition, with the Hawaiian word aloha, one of the sweetest forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central ornament. To the donors of the gift, Clemens wrote, The beautiful mantle was put in its place an hour ago, and its friendly aloha was the first uttered greeting received on my seventy-third birthday. It is rich in color, rich in quality, and rich in decoration. Therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such things which was born in me, and which I have seldom been able to indulge to my content. It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, and I beg to thank the committee for providing me that pleasure. To F. N. Otremba, who had carved the mantle, he sent this word. I am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. It is worthy of the choicest place in the house, and it has it. It was the second beautiful mantle in Stormfield, the Hartford Library mantle, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the Stormfield living-room. Altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. Clemens, in the morning, drove down to see the library lot which Mr. Theodore Adams had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. He recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing, I said, I hope a year from now we shall be here still playing the great game. And he answered, as then, Yes, it is a great game, the best game on earth. And he held out his hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted, though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine. Mark Twain's second present came at Christmas time, about ten days earlier. A letter came from Robert J. Collier, saying that he had bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to Mark Twain as a Christmas gift. He added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for it, and the loan of a keeper from Barnum and Bailey's headquarters at Bridgeport. The news created a disturbance in Stormfield. One could not refuse, discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that, but it seemed a disaster to accept it. An elephant would require a roomy and warm place, also a variety of attention which Stormfield was not prepared to supply. The telephone was set going, and certain timid excuses were offered by the secretary. There was no good place to put an elephant in Stormfield, but Mr. Collier said, quite confidently, oh, put him in the garage. But there's no heat in the garage. Well, put him in the loggia then. That's closed in, isn't it, for the winter? Plenty of sunlight, just the place for a young elephant. But we play cards in the loggia. We use it for a sort of sun parlor. But that wouldn't matter.  He'll be just like a kitten. I'll send the man up to look over the place and tell you just how to take care of him, and I'll send up several bales of hay in advance.  There was nothing further to be done, only to wait and dread until the Christmas presents arrival. A few days before Christmas, ten bales of hay arrived, and several bushels of carrots. This store of Provinder aroused no enthusiasm at Stormfield. It would seem there was no escape now. On Christmas morning Mr. Lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at the station who said he was an elephant trainer from Barnum and Bailey's sent by Mr. Collier to look at the elephant's quarters and get him settled when he should arrive. Orders were given to bring the man over. The day of doom was at hand. But Lounsbury's detective instinct came once more into play. He had seen a good many elephant trainers at Bridgeport, and he thought this one had a doubtful look. Where is the elephant? he asked as they drove along. He will arrive at noon. Where are you going to put him? In the loggia. How big is he? About the size of a cow. How long have you been with Barnum and Bailey? Six years. Then you must know some friends of mine, naming two that had no existence until that moment. Oh, yes indeed, I know them well. Lounsbury didn't say any more just then, but he had a feeling that perhaps the dread at Stormfield had grown unnecessarily large. Something told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler or a valet than an elephant trainer. They drove to Stormfield, and the trainer looked over the place. It would do it perfectly, he said. He gave a few instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was driven back to the station to bring it. Lounsbury came back by and by bringing the elephant, but not the trainer. It didn't need a trainer. It was a beautiful specimen with soft, smooth coat, and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved, and small, suited to the loggia, as Collier had said, for it was only two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton. One of the finest toy elephants ever seen anywhere. It was a good joke, such as Mark Twain loved, a carefully prepared, harmless bit of foolery. He wrote Robert Collier threatening him with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating Stormfield. To send an elephant in a trance under pretense that it was dead or stuffed, he said. The elephant came to life, as you knew it would, and began to observe Christmas, and we now have no furniture left, and no servants, and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars, nothing but the elephant. Be kind, be merciful, be generous. Take him away, and send us what is left of the earthquake!" Collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift elephant in the trunk, and with such chafing and deity the year came to an end. End of Chapter 275 A Mantle and a Baby Elephant Red by John Greenman Section 65 of Mark Twain, A Biography. Part II. 1907-1910 When the bad weather came, there was not much company at Stormfield, and I went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing, he craved diversion. My own home was a little more than a half mile away, and I enjoyed the walk, whatever the weather. I usually managed to arrive about three o'clock. He would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the hilltop, and he would be at the door when I arrived, so that there might be no delay in getting at the games. Or, if it happened that he wished to show me something in his room, I would hear his rich voice sounding down the stair. Once when I arrived I heard him calling, and going up I found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the ceiling. He said, They seem to patch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors. Sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent. He pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on them. How beautifully they light up, he said. Some of them in the sunlight, some still in the shadow. He walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields. The lights and colors are always changing there, he said. I never tire of it. To see him then so full of the interest and the light of the moment, one might easily believe he had never known tragedy in Shipwreck. More than anyone I ever knew, he lived in the present. Most of us are either dreaming of the past or anticipating the future, forever beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of tomorrow. Mark Twain's step was timed to the march of the moment. There were days when he recalled the past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future. But his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular locality where he found it. The thing which caught his fancy, however slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if never afterward. He was especially interested that winter in the Shakespeare Bacon problem. He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, by George Greenwood, and another in press, Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon, by William Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon and Bacon Only had written these Shakespeare dramas. I was ardently opposed to this idea. The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had come up to London and began by holding horses outside of the theatre, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock testimony, Ben Johnson's Sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them, but he refused to accept any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that Shakespeare had written one of them. Is there any evidence that he didn't? I asked. There is evidence that he couldn't, he said. It required a man with the fullest legal equipment to have written them. When you have read Greenwood's book, you will see how untenable is any argument for Shakespeare's authorship. I was willing to concede something and offer to compromise. Perhaps, I said, Shakespeare was the belasco of that day. The managerial genius unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. In that case it is not unlikely that the plays would be known as Shakespeare's. Even in this day John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly is sometimes called Belasco's play, though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of it. He considered this view, but not very favorably. The Booth book was at this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it, but he had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction, I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way. How can you be so positive, I asked. He replied, I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned. I now suspected that he was joking and asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium, but he was clearly in earnest. It is the great discovery of the age, he said quite seriously. The world will soon ring with it. I wish I could tell you about it, but I have passed my word. You will not have long to wait. I was going to sail for the Mediterranean in February, and I asked if it would be likely that I would know this great secret before I sailed. He thought not, but he said that more than likely the startling news would be given to the world while I was on the water, and it might come to me on the ship by wireless. I confess I was amazed and intensely curious by this time. I conjectured the discovery of some document, some bacon, or Shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the authorship. I hinted that he might write me a letter which I could open on the ship, but he was firm in his refusal. He had passed his word, he repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that. But he assured me more than once that wherever I might be, in whatever remote locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it. I was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the time of the upheaval. Naturally the Shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days that we were together. He had engaged another stenographer, and was now dictating, fornoons, his own views on the subject, views coordinated with those of Mr. Greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished and decorated in his own gay manner. These were chapters for his autobiography, he said, and I think he had then no intention of making a book of them. I could not quite see why he should take all this argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that bacon and not Shakespeare had written the plays. I thought the whole matter very curious. The Shakespeare interest had diverging by paths. One evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said, There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known. And he added, Jesus Christ. He reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value. I agreed that they contained confusing statements, and inflicted, more or less, with justice and reason. But I said I thought there was truth in them, too. Why do you think so? he asked. Because they contain matters that are self-evident, things eternally and essentially just. Then you make your own Bible? Yes, from those materials combined with human reason. Then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from. I admitted that the source did not matter, that truth from Shakespeare, Epictetus, or Aristotle was quite as valuable as from the scriptures. We were on common ground now. He mentioned Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and their blameless lives. I, still pursuing the thought of Jesus, asked, do you not think it's strange that in that day when Christ came, admitting that there was a Christ, such a character could have come at all in the time of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, when all was ceremony and unbelief? I remember, he said, the Sadducees didn't believe in hell. He brought them one. Nor the resurrection, he brought them that also. He did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and mission related by the Gospels. It is all a myth, he said. There have been saviours in every age of the world. It is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of Santa Claus. But, I argued, even the spirit of Christmas is real when it is genuine. Suppose that we admit there was no physical saviour, that it is only an idea, a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself, and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves. Wouldn't that make it worthy? But then the fairy story of the Atonement dissolves, and with it crumbles the very foundations of any established church. You can create your own Testament, your own Scripture, and your own Christ, but you've got to give up your Atonement. As related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it, but the death of the Old Order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of Atonement, doesn't it? He said, A conclusion like that has about as much to do with the Gospels and Christianity as Shakespeare had to do with Bacon's plays. You are preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few centuries ago. I have preached that in my own Gospel. I remembered then and realized that by my own clumsy ladder I had merely mounted from dogma and superstition to his platform of training the ideals to a higher contentment of soul. End of Chapter 276 Shakespeare Bacon Talk Read by John Greenman Section 66 of Mark Twain a Biography Part 2, 1907 to 1910 This Libber Box recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain a Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne Chapter 277 Is Shakespeare Dead? I set out on my long journey with much reluctance, however a series of guests with various diversions had been planned and it seemed a good time to go. Clemens gave me letters of introduction and bad me got speed. It would be near the end of April before I should see him again. Now and then on the ship and in the course of my travels I remember the great news I was to hear concerning Shakespeare. In Cairo at Shepherds I looked eagerly through English newspapers expecting any moment to come upon great headlines, but I was always disappointed. Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard any particular Shakespeare news. Arriving in New York I found that Clemens himself had published his Shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own entitled Is Shakespeare Dead? The title certainly suggested Spiritistic Matters and I got a volume at Harpers and read it going up on the train, hoping to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery. But it was only matter I had already known. The secret was still unrevealed. At Reading I lost not much time in getting up to Stormfield. There had been changes in my absence. Clara Clemens had returned from her travels and Jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her father's secretary. He was greatly pleased with these things and declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about him. He was quite alone that day and we walked up and down the great living-room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans. For one thing he had incorporated his pen name, Mark Twain, in order that the protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary business in general should not require his personal attention. He seemed to find a relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of responsibility. When we went in for billiards I spoke of his book, which I had read on the way up, and of the great Shakespearean secret, which was to astonish the world. Then he told me that the matter had been delayed, but that he was no longer required to suppress it, that the revelation was in the form of a book, a book which revealed conclusively to anyone who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the acrostic name of Francis Bacon in a great variety of forms ran through many, probably through all, of the so-called Shakespeare plays. He said it was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published, that Ignatius Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the author of this book, William Stone Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the Bacon signatures were there. The book would be issued in a few days, he said. He had seen a set of proofs of it, and while it had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate its great revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning mind. He confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might grasp it. He had failed on the acrostics at first, but more recently he had understood the rule and had been able to work out several Bacon signatures. He complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the book came I would have no trouble with it. Without going further with this matter, I may say here that the book arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down. It was certainly an interesting, if not wholly convincing, occupation, and it would be a difficult task for anyone to prove that the ciphers are not there. Just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it would be hard to say. Certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in the literary world, and the name of William Shakespeare still continues to be printed on the title page of those marvelous dramas so long associated with his name. Mark Twain's own book on the subject, Is Shakespeare Dead, found a wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers. It contained no new arguments, but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was certainly readable. Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening with Mr. Edward Loomis we attended a fine performance of Romeo and Juliet, given by Southern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said quite earnestly, That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote. Among the visitors who had come to Stormfield was Howells. Clemens had called a meeting of the Human Race Club, but only Howells was able to attend. We will let him tell of his visit. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before, in Hartford. But there was not the old ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for good. But we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me, because it was my son who designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savans, the close-knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be reased and roofed with vines. But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age, for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us. Now we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clay banks together like crystal mosses, and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the place. My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender reluctant, on his part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it, and I know for the fondness. And if I looked out of my door, there he was in his long night down, swaying up and down the corridor and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with someone. The last morning a soft sugar snow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and had been kept all those intervening years in honourable retirement for this final use. This carriage, a finely built coop, had been presented to Mrs. Crane when the Hartford house was closed. When Stormfield was built she returned it to its original owner. Its springs had not grown yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age, but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro spiritual which I heard him sing with such fervour when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. Howell's visit resulted in a new inspiration. Clemens started to write him one night when he could not sleep and had been reading the volume of letters of James Russell Lowell. Then next morning he was seized with the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as Howell's, Twitchell and Rogers—letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for some future public. He wrote two of these immediately—to Howell's and to Twitchell. The Howell's letter, or letters, for it was really double, is both pathetic and amusing. The first part ran three in the morning, April 17, 1909. My pen has gone dry, and the ink is out of reach. Howell's, did you write me day before—day before yesterday, or did I dream it? In my mind's eye I most vividly see your hand right on a square blue envelope in the mail pile. I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. Was it an illusion? I am reading Lowell's letters and smoking. I woke an hour ago, and am reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, volume 1, I have just margined a note. Young friend, I like that. You ought to see him now. It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It was a brick out of a blue sky, and knocked me groggy for a moment. Me, the pathos of it, is that we were young then, and he, why, so was he. But he didn't know it. He didn't even know it nine years later, when we saw him approaching, and you warned me, saying, Don't say anything about age. He has just turned fifty, and thinks he is old, and broods over it. Well, Clara did sing, and you wrote her a dear letter. Time to go to sleep. Yours ever, Mark. The second letter, begun at ten a.m., outlines the plan by which he is to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing that the letter is not to be mailed. The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, and you can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for what you are hungering and thirsting to say at that particular moment. And you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom, because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with theology, you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration. You'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm, and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's indecent, you won't waste it on Twitchell. You'll save it for Howells, who will love it. As he will never see it, you can make it really indecenter than he could stand. And so no harm is done. Yet a vast advantage is gained. The letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. The Twitchell letter concerned missionaries and added nothing to what he had already said on the subject. He wrote no letter to Mr. Rogers. Perhaps never wrote to him again. End of Chapter 277 Is Shakespeare Dead? Read by John Greenman. Section 67 of Mark Twain A Biography Part 2 1907-1910 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain A Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne Chapter 278 The Death of Henry Rogers Clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to Norfolk, Virginia to attend the opening ceremonies of the Virginia Railway. He had made a speech on that occasion in which he had paid a public tribute to Henry Rogers and told something of his personal obligation to the financier. He began by telling what Mr. Rogers had done for Helen Keller, whom he called the most marvellous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since Joan of Arc. Then he said, That is not all Mr. Rogers has done, but you never see that side of his character because it is never protruding. But he lends a helping hand daily out of that generous heart of his. You never hear of it. But he is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright. But the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark, it is bright. And it's rays penetrate, and others do see it who are not God. I would take this opportunity to tell something that I have never been allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print. And if I don't look at him, I can tell it now. In 1894, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which I was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. If you will remember what commerce was at that time, you will recall that you could not sell anything and could not buy anything. And I was on my back. My books were not worth anything at all. And I could not give away my copyrights. Mr. Rogers had long enough vision ahead to say, your books have supported you before, and after the panic is over, they will support you again. And that was a correct proposition. He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin. He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising, at the end of four years, I would pay dollar for dollar. That arrangement was made. Otherwise, I would now be living out of doors, under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that.  He is always trying to look like me. I don't blame him for that. These are only emblematic of his character. And that is all. I say, without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever known. This had been early in April, something more than a month later Clemens was making a business trip to New York to see Mr. Rogers. I was telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before he started. I do not remember why I was not to go along that day, for I usually made such trips with him. I think it was planned that Ms. Clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the Grand Central Station. At all events, she did meet him there, with the news that, during the night, Mr. Rogers had suddenly died. This was May 20, 1909. The news had already come to the house, and I had lost no time in preparation to follow by the next train. I joined him at the Grovner Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. He was upset and deeply troubled by the loss of his staunch advisor and friend. He had a helpless look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him adrift. And how I hate to do anything, he added, that requires the least modicum of intelligence. We remained at the Grovner for Mr. Rogers' funeral. Clemens served as one of the pallbearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to Fairhaven. He wanted to be very quiet, he said. He could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation. So we remained in the hotel apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime. Once he asked me to write a letter to Jean, say, your father says every little while, how glad I am that Jean is at home again. For that is true, and I think of it all the time. But by and by after a long period of silence he said, Mr. Rogers is under the ground now. And so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so largely to the comfort of Mark Twain's old age. He was a man of fine sensibilities and generous impulses, with all a keen sense of humour. One Christmas, when he presented Mark Twain with a watch and a match case, he wrote, My dear Clemens, for many years your friends have been complaining of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality. Complaints are now coming in of your use of time. Most of your friends think that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief complaint is in regard to the quality. I have been appealed to in the meantime, and have concluded that it is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking box. Therefore I take the liberty of sending you here with a machine that will furnish only the best.  P. S. Complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you make in your trousers in scratching matches. You will find a furrow on the bottom of the article enclosed. Please use it. Compliments of the season to the family. He was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write, to Clemens at least, they were always playful and unhurried. One reading them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on whose shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance, burdens so heavy that at last he was crushed beneath their weight. CHAPTER 279 An Extension of Copyright One of the pleasant things that came to Mark Twain that year was the passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an extension of fourteen years. Champ Clarke had been largely instrumental in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily since Mark Twain's visit to Washington in 1906. Following that visit, Clarke wrote, It the original bill would never pass because the bill had literature and music all mixed together. Being a Missourian, of course, it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you. What I want to say is this. You have prepared a simple bill relating only to the copyright of books. Send it to me, and I will try to have it passed. Clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the copyright question by and by, that he had in hand a dialogue similar to the open letter to the Register of Copyrights, North American Review, January 1905, which would instruct Congress, but this he did not complete. Meantime a simple bill was proposed, and in early 1909 it became a law. In June, Clarke wrote, Dr. Samuel L. Clemens, Stormfield, Reading, Connecticut My dear doctor, I am gradually becoming myself again after a period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration. After a long lecture tour last summer, I went immediately into a hard campaign. As soon as the election was over, and I had recovered my disposition, I came here and went into those tariff hearings, which began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until midnight. Listening patiently and meekly with all to the lying of tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of the long session. That was followed by a hot campaign to take Uncle Joe's rules away from him. On the heels of that campaign that failed came the tariff fight in the house. I am now getting time to breathe regularly, and I am writing to ask you if the copyright law is acceptable to you. If it is not acceptable to you, I want to ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed, and I will give my best endeavors to the work. I believe that your ideas and wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what should be done in the case. Your friend, Champ Clark. To this, Clemens replied, Stormfield, Reading, Connecticut, June 5, 1909. Dear Champ Clark, is the new copyright law acceptable to me? emphatically yes. Clark, it is the only sane and clearly defined and just and righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United States. Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision. The bill which was before the committee two years ago, when I was down there, was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting and apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen. And we all said the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless, out of this chaos nothing can be built. But we were in error. Out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has been constructed. The warring interests have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective lightning rods out of the statute book, I think. When I think of that other bill, which even the deity couldn't understand, and of this one, which even I can understand, I take off my hat to the man or men who devised this one. Was it R. U. Johnson? Was it the author's league? Was it both together? I don't know, but I take off my hat anyway. Johnson has written a valuable article about the new law. I enclose it. But last, at last and for the first time in copyright history, we are ahead of England, ahead of her in two ways, by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned. Does this sound like shouting? Then I must modify it. All we possessed of copyright justice before the fourth of last March we owed to England's initiative. Truly yours, S. L. Clemens. Clemens had prepared what was the final word on the subject of copyright just before this bill was passed, a petition for a law which he believed would regulate the whole matter. It was a generous, even if a somewhat utopian plan, eminently characteristic of its author. The new fourteen-year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any other compromise seem inadvisable. The reader may consider this last copyright document by Mark Twain under Appendix N. at the end of this volume. End of Chapter 279. An Extension of Copyright. Read by John Greenman. Section 69 of Mark Twain of Biography. Part II. 1907-1910. Clemens had promised to go to Baltimore for the graduation of Francesca, of his London visit in 1907, and to make a short address to her class. It was the 8th of June when we set out on this journey. The reader may remember that it was the 8th of June, 1867, that Mark Twain sailed for the Holy Land. It was the 8th of June 1907 that he sailed for England to take his Oxford degree. This 8th of June, 1909, was at least slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement made with Francesca in London, and my notes show that, he discussed, on the way to the station, some incidents of his Holy Land trip and his attitude at that time toward Christian traditions. As he rarely mentioned the Quaker City trip, the coincidence seems rather curious. It is most unlikely that Clemens himself in any way associated the two dates. But the day was rather bleak, and there was a chilly rain. Clemens had a number of errands to do in New York, and we drove from one place to another, attending to them. Finally in the afternoon, the rain ceased, and while I was arranging some matters for him, he concluded to take a ride on the top of a Fifth Avenue stage. It was fine and pleasant when he started, but the weather thickened again, and when he returned he complained that he had felt a little chilly. He seemed in fine condition, however, next morning, and was in good spirits all the way to Baltimore. Chauncey de Pew was on the train, and they met in the dining-car. The last time, I think, they ever saw each other. He was tired when we reached the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, and did not wish to see the newspaper men. It happened that the reporters had a special purpose in coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed that in his Shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste and publication, full credit had not been given to Mr. Greenwood for the long extracts quoted from his work. The sensational headlines in a morning paper, is Mark Twain a Plagiarist, had naturally prompted the newspaper men to see what he would have to say on the subject. It was a simple matter, he easily explained, and Clemens himself was less disturbed about it than anybody. He felt no sense of guilt, he said, and the fact that he had been stealing and caught at it would give Mr. Greenwood's book far more advertising than if he had given him the full credit which he had intended. He found a good deal of amusement in the situation, his only worry being that Clara and Jean would see the paper and be troubled. He had taken off his clothes and was lying down reading. After a little he got up and began walking up and down the room. Presently he stopped, and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast. He said, I think I must have caught a little cold yesterday on that Fifth Avenue stage. I have a curious pain in my breast. I suggested that he lie down again, and I would fill his hot water bag. The pain passed away presently and he seemed to be dozing. I stepped into the next room and busied myself with some writing. By and by I heard him stirring again and went in where he was. He was walking up and down and began talking of some recent ethnological discoveries, something relating to prehistoric man. What a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been, he said, the very first one. Think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his arms, practicing and getting ready for the pulpit.  It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it. It seemed to me that his face had become rather gray. I said, Where is it exactly, Mr. Clemens? He laid his hand in the center of his breast and said, It is here. And it is very peculiar indeed. Remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart, and the peculiar deadly pain he had mentioned seemed ominous. I suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had again relieved it. This time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for it did not return while we were in Baltimore. It was the first positive manifestation of the angina, which eventually would take him from us. The weather was pleasant in Baltimore, and his visit to St. Timothy's school and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most to him. The flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses, assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice, not to smoke, to excess, not to drink, to excess, not to marry, to excess. He standing there in a garb as white as their own, it made a rare picture, a sweet memory, and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform to any one. Edward S. Martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great feasting in the big assembly hall. It was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the death of Edward Everett Hale, another of the old group. Clemens said thoughtfully after a moment, I had the greatest respect and esteem for Edward Everett Hale, the greatest admiration for his work. I am grieved to hear of his death as I can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended. We were leaving the Belvedere next morning, and when the subject of breakfast came up for discussion he said, That was the most delicious Baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday morning. I think we'll just repeat that order. It reminds me of John Quarles Farm. We had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast that morning down in the dining room, and Francesca and her mother were there. As he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train he told me how once fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed cars there for Washington and had barely caught his train, the crowd yelling at him as he ran. We remained overnight in New York, and that evening at the Grovener he read aloud a poem of his own which I had not seen before. He had brought it along with some intention of reading it at St. Timothy's, he said, but had not found the occasion suitable. I wrote it a long time ago in Paris. I'd been reading aloud to Mrs. Clemens and Suzy in ninety-three, I think, about Lord Clive and Warren Hastings from Macaulay, how great they were and how far they fell. Then I took an imaginary case that of some old demented man, mumbling of his former state. I described him and repeated some of his mumblings. Suzy and Mrs. Clemens said, write it, so I did, by and by, and this is it. I call it the derelict.  My admiral at post, His pen and blue faint in the wilderness of sky, My long yards bristling with my gallant crew, My ports flung wide, my guns displayed, My tall spars hid in belling sail. You struck your top sails, then, and made a besence. Now your manners fail. He had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the figure and phrasing were full of vigor. It is strong and fine, I said, when he had finished. Yes, he assented. It seems so as I read it now. It is so long, since I have seen it, that it is like reading another man's work. I should call it good, I believe. He put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor, talking. There is no figure for the human being like the ship, he said. No such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict. Such men as clive and hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift, helpless, tossed by every wind and tide. We returned to Reading next day. On the train going home he fell to talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been able to read. When I take up one of Jane Austen's books, he said, such as pride and prejudice, I feel like a bar-keeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be, and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so. He recalled again how Stenyak had come to Hartford, and how humiliated Mrs. Clements had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with the writings of Thackery and others. I don't know anything about anything, he said mournfully, and never did. My brother used to try to get me to read Dickens long ago. I couldn't do it. I was ashamed, but I couldn't do it. Yes, I have read the tale of two cities and could do it again. I have read it a good many times. But I never could stand Meredith, and most of the other celebrities. By and by he handed me the Saturday Times Review saying, Here is a fine poem, a great poem, I think. I can stand that. It was the Palatine in the Dark Ages by Willis Sebert Cather, reprinted from McClure's. The reader will understand better than I can express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to Mark Twain. The Palatine. Have you been with the king to Rome, brother, big brother? I've been there and I've come home back to your play, little brother. Oh, how high is Caesar's house, brother, big brother? Goats, about the doorways, brows, night-hawks, nest in the burnt roof-tree, home of the wild bird and home of the bee. A thousand chambers of marble lie wide to the sun and the wind and the sky. Poppies we find amongst our wheat grow on Caesar's banquet seat. Cattle, crop, and neat-herds drows on the floors of Caesar's house. But what has become of Caesar's gold, brother, big brother? The times are bad, and the world is old. Who knows the wear of the Caesar's gold? Night comes black on the Caesar's hill. The wells are deep and the tales are ill. Fireflies gleam in the damp and mold, all that is left of the Caesar's gold. Back to your play, little brother. Farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to these lines of kippling. How is it not good for the Christian's health to hurry the Aryan brown, for the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down? And the end of the fight is a tombstone white and the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear.  I could stand any amount of that, he said, and presently life is too long and too short, too long for the weariness of it, too short for the work to be done. At the very most the average mind can only master a few languages and a little history. I said, still we need not worry, if death ends all it does not matter, and if life is eternal there will be time enough. Yes, he assented rather grimly, that optimism of yours is always ready to turn hell's backyard into a playground. I said that, old as I was, I had taken up the study of French and mentioned Bayard Taylor's having begun Greek at fifty, expecting to need it in heaven. Clemens said reflectively, yes, but, you see, that was Greek. End of chapter two hundred and eighty, A Warning, read by John Greenman. Section seventy of Mark Twain A Biography. Part two, 1907 to 1910. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain A Biography, by Albert Bigelow Payne. Chapter two hundred and eighty one, The Last Summer at Stormfield. I was at Stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. At first I went up only for the day, but later, when his health did not improve and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, I remained most of the nights as well. Our rooms were separated only by a bathroom, and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake. In the very early morning I would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows, sound asleep, his glasses on, the reading lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night. But as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always interest and nearly always amusement in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or earlier. Sometimes when he thought at time for me to be stirring he would call softly, but loudly enough for me to hear, if awake, and I would go in and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or rather he would settle them, while I dropped in a remark here and there merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution. The pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as the summer advanced. Also they became more severe. Dr. Edward Quinterd came up from New York, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking with less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens' lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. There was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking, and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other direction when it was not too warm or windy. Once we went as far as the river, and I showed him a part of his land he had not seen before, a beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment. On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. I told him I was going to build a study on it, and call it Markland. He thought it an admirable building site, and I think he was pleased with the name. Later he said, if you had a place for that extra billiard table of mine, the Rogers table which had been left in New York, I would turn it over to you. I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a billiard table, and he said, now that will be very good.  You must build that study. So it was we planned, and by and by Mr. Lonsbury had undertaken the work. During the walks Clemens rested a good deal. There were the New England hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that weariness sometimes brought on the pain. As I remember now I think how bravely he bore it.  But he never complained. He never bewailed, and at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack. We had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. At the first hint from him I would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came quickly. But there were times, and alas they came oftener, when that deadly gripping did not soon release him. Yet there would come a week or a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered, more or less. We were alone together most of the time. He did not appear to care for company that summer. Clara Clemens had a concert tour in Prospect, and her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part of her time to study. For Jean, who was in love with every form of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant farmhouse on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some stock and poultry, and was overflowingly happy. Asip Gabrilovitch was a guest in the house, a good portion of the summer, but had been invalidated through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared, even at mealtimes. So it came about that there could hardly have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this, the last year of Mark Twain's life. For me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. One is not likely to associate twice with a being from another star. End of Chapter 281, The Last Summer at Stormfield, read by John Greenman.