There is nothing selfish about the Modoc.  She is fascinated with the new baby.  The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an Indian.  She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys, and guinea-hens on the place.  Yesterday, as she marched along the winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can look over the Modoc’s head.  The devotion of these vassals has been purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc, attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.

There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens.  Howells’s “Foregone Conclusion” was running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it.  Clemens wrote the author: 

I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story.  The creatures of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.  If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter Scott’s artificialities shall continue to live.

At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane.  These two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in which they were mutually interested.  They had portable-hammock arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and discussed through summer afternoons.  The ‘Mutineers of the Bounty’ was one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest.  Also there were certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and reread.  ‘Pepys’ Diary’, ‘Two Years Before the Mast’, and a book on the Andes were reliable favorites.  Mark Twain read not so many books, but read a few books often.  Those named were among the literature he asked for each year of his return to Quarry Farm.  Without them, the farm and the summer would not be the same.

Then there was ‘Lecky’s History of European Morals’; there were periods when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox ways.  Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky.  He made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world’s moral history—­notes not always quotable in the family circle.  Mainly, however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.  In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being “that