“Piff!” from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and behold!  Mark Twain had curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.

The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute’s thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was an accident of the most trivial.  He was quite young.  I was shaking his hand.  I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk—­this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.

Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality.  Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer.

The meeting of those two men made the summer of ’89 memorable in later years.  But it was recalled sadly, too.  Theodore Crane, who had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring attack and died July 3d.  It was the first death in the immediate families for more than seventeen years, Mrs. Clemens, remembering that earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings.

CLXX

“The prince and the pauper” On the stage

There was an unusual dramatic interest in the Clemens home that autumn.  Abby Sage Richardson had dramatized ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, and Daniel Frohman had secured Elsie Leslie (Lyde) to take the double role of the Prince and Tom Canty.  The rehearsals were going on, and the Clemens children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome.  Susy Clemens was inspired to write a play of her own—­a pretty Greek fancy, called “The Triumph of Music,” and when it was given on Thanksgiving night, by herself, with Clara and Jean and Margaret Warner, it was really a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of Arcady.  Clemens was proud of Susy’s achievement, and deeply moved by it.  He insisted on having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year.

Pretty Elsie Leslie became a favorite of the Clemens household.  She was very young, and when she visited Hartford Jean and she were companions and romped together in the hay-loft.  She was also a favorite of William Gillette.  One day when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise—­a unique one.  They agreed to embroider a pair of slippers for her—­to do the work themselves.  Writing to her of it, Mark Twain said: