“They seem to catch 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 delight of the moment, one might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck.  More than any one 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 to-morrow.  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 one 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 the 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 theater, 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 Jonson’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’s 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 offered a compromise.

“Perhaps,” I said, “Shakespeare was the Belasoo 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 ‘Madam Butterfly’ is sometimes called Belasco’s play; though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of it.”