to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay.  So he said, but no doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.  He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance, a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from others could quench; it had to burn itself out.  He was eagerly and lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably.  In his frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could not, listen to reason.  But if between the paroxysms he were confronted with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against him.  At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor’s head.  Later, he wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him to have the paper watched for these injuries.  He had done so, and how many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months?  Just two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly.  So the paper was acquitted, and the editor’s life was spared.  The wretch never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.

His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or bribed for the occasion.  All that you had to do was to signify that you wanted his help.  When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur’s administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed to me.  In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his friendship with Grant and Grant’s friendship with Arthur.  I asked him to write to Grant in my father’s behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant personally.  This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant’s publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such men could not help doing.  Clemens made the appointment, and we went to find Grant in his business office, that place where his business innocence was afterward so betrayed.  He was very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes.  When I stated my business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr. Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.