piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims.  I think it must always have ground in Clemens’s soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right setting.  Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington.  I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child’s note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men.  I do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it.  I am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt.  But it must have been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity.  To be sure, they were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them; nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it myself.  Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it.  But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.

XVI.

Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in Boston, he was more rarely with us.  We could never be long together without something out of the common happening, and one day something far out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy.  We were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously impersonal interest, “Oh, see that woman getting into the water!” This would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and back gate.  At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door, and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.  Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue.  As soon as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild creature on our hands.  She was not very young and not very pretty, and we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street