cloth, napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish just caught.  Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of such a phenomenally dirty house.

An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no harm.  It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat management I ever saw.  Our admiral knew his business.

We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry, although we have had many heavy showers this morning.

Here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he adds:  “I’m on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight.”

The trip down the Rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as literary material.  Clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages with his notes of it, then gave it up.  Traveling alone with no one but Joseph and the Admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights.  He tried to rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters, such as Uncle Abner, Fargo, and Stavely, a young artist; also Harris, from the Tramp Abroad; but Harris was not really there this time, and Mark Twain’s genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction, found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon.

It was a day above Avignon that he had an experience worth while.  They were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later as a soul-stirring shock.  Pointing to the outline of the distant range he said to the courier: 

“Name it.  Who is it?”

The courier said, “Napoleon.”

Clemens assented.  The Admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of the great commander himself.  They watched and discussed the phenomenon until they reached the village.  Next morning Clemens was up for a first daybreak glimpse of his discovery.  Later he reported it to Mrs. Clemens: 

I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning—­the most superb sunrise—­the most marvelous sunrise—­& I saw it all, from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the final explosion of glory.  But it had an interest private to itself & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to