X.

I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,

with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in

the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,

Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, “The

ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it,” and he gave his

guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not

go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of

sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of

the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house

stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed

the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine

glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south

there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard

as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the

west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly

neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines

climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a

fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while

we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty

bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of

its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens’s best meal, and he sat

longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner;

luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his

dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and

down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his

head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say;

he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another’s remark and

gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find

suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the

table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor

to their trebles in singing.

Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made

himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay

at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the

gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge

and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a

lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in

that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.

Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and

if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair

of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our

delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,

after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the

intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost

killed her, but it was worth it.

In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with

reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At

first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided

that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer

under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you

go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at

Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth

considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.

One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot

Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a

while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then

one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and had gone

promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like

effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences

of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged

him.

He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial

ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with

the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special

invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go

into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the

Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we

breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of

many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside

and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our

startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory

betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post

of duty.

Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented

an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its

way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn

steps of Porter’s Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some

means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the

road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The

liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some

with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have

hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of

any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally

hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled

panting back to Boston, with “their tongues hanging out like dogs,” but

we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we

could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift

procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,

passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud

of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them

and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens

seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion,

which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of

defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay

party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously

empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He

said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would gladly,

perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster

renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we

stood, lost in this “contest of civilities,” the coach passed us, with

gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started

in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not

imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The

unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall

what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered

at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they

could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to

Concord that day and did not.

We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then

slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time

as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to

practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted

wisdom of taking the train at Porter’s Station, and had agreed to say

that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my

house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude

without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up

a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it

before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these

precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the

proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left

with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was

finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord

would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat

over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt

detection.