By the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her.  She said: 

    “Why, you’ve never known it, Mr. Clemens, because you’ve never seen
    me before.”

    “Why, that is true, now that I come to think; it certainly is true,
    and it must be one of the reasons why I have forgotten your name. 
    But I remember it now perfectly—­it’s Mary.”

    She was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle,
    and she said: 

    “Oh no, it isn’t; it’s Margaret.”

    I feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said: 

“Ah, well, I couldn’t have made that mistake a few years ago; but I am old, and one of age’s earliest infirmities is a damaged memory; but I am clearer now—­clearer-headed—­it all comes back to me just as if it were yesterday.  It’s Margaret Holcomb.”

    She was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a
    happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine,
    and she said: 

    “Oh, you are wrong again; you don’t get anything right.  It isn’t
    Holcomb, it’s Blackmer.”

    I was ashamed again, and confessed it; then: 

    “How old are you, dear?”

    “Twelve; New-Year’s.  Twelve and a month.”

We were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days.  Every day we made pedestrian excursions—­called them that anyway, and honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and rough-coated donkey by the name of Maud.  Maud was four feet long; she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight.  Her tender was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the ground.  This battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified, gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose name, for some reason or other, was Reginald.  Reginald and Maud—­I shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood for.  The trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it generally took us three hours to make it.  This was because Maud set the pace.  Whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected it; she stopped and said with her ears: 

    “This is getting unsatisfactory.  We will camp here.”

The whole idea of these excursions was that Margaret and I should employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were oftener in the cart than out of it.  She drove and I superintended.  In the course of the first excursions I found a beautiful little shell on the beach at Spanish Point; its hinge was old and dry, and the two halves came apart in my hand.  I gave one of them to Margaret and said: 

“Now dear, sometime or other in