there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely progress from California; and there was Clemens.  Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good fellowship, Bret Harte’s fleeting dramatization of Clemens’s mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates.  “Why, fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark’s life,” and I remember the glance from under Clemens’s feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.  We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative submission.  It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens.

Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford.  Aldrich was going on to be his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner’s, but Clemens had come part way to welcome us both.  In the good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round.  There was constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors.  Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.  The house was the design of that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it should be called the English violet order of architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner’s humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.  The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription publication.  An army of agents was overrunning the country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands in completed sale.  Of the ‘Innocents Abroad’ he said, “It sells right along just like the Bible,” and ‘Roughing It’ was swiftly following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity.  But he lectured Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication