The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one.  Their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought—­echo-mind answering to mind—­without the employment of words.  Clemens records in his notes: 

Sunday A.M., August 11th.  Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon, last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage which has thus far hit me with force—­Tito compromising with his conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best thing.  Joe entered the room five minutes—­no, three minutes later —­and without prelude said, “I read that book you’ve got there six years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing.”  This is Joe’s first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty- four hours ago.  So my mind operated on his in this instance.  He said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn’t know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came and that particular passage.  Now I, forty feet away, in another room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment.

    Couldn’t suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book
    had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112,
    Tauchnitz edition.

And again: 

The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable.  This evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the Matterhorn.  Then Joe said, “We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and inquire for Livy’s telegram.”  If he had been but one instant later I should have said those words instead of him.

Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson.  They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time.  The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, “And there’s the man!” Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling.

Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents.  Clemens held that there was no such thing an accident:  that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny.  Once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below.  It seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion.  The condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child’s fall and its escape had been invested in life’s primal atom.