departure was the result.  Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all who saw them were filled with wonder and delight.  Architecture has lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine that Potter’s “English violet” order of design, as he himself designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible amount of room.

Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the builders, and work was rapidly pushed along.  Then in May the whole matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes), while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.

XC

A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY

They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an amanuensis.  There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man, and it may as well be set down here.  Clemens found, a few weeks after his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he could make no use of Thompson’s services.  He gave Thompson fifty dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man’s desiring to return to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could return it some day, and never thought of it again.  But the young man remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt.  That letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain.  He felt that it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years’ struggle with ill-fortune.  He returned the money, of course, and in a biographical note commented: 

How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it!  Thompson’s heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days.  I had forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly as lightning.  I can see him now.  It was on the deck of the Batavia, in the dock.  The ship was casting off, with that hubbub and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure preparations in those days—­an impressive contrast with the solemn silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of the present day.  Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion.  We all had on our