have given a wounded child.  I find this a fit place to say that his mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they can.  He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the only present help for working-men.  He would show that side with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that with Unions was the working-man’s only present hope of standing up like a man against money and the power of it.  There was a time when I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever.  I wish that all the work-folk could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the ‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’

XII.

Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order.  One night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst.  I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress.  They had broken their journey with a night’s rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in two days.  Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott’s Tower, ten miles out of Hartford.  As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked.  Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.  He always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen asleep.  I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.