“Don’t you dare to refuse the invitation,” said Howells, and naturally Clemens didn’t, and wrote back: 

I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take breakfast with me in the morning.  I will have a good room for you and a fire.  Can’t you tell her it always makes you sick to go home late at night or something like that?  That sort of thing arouses Mrs. Clemens’s sympathies easily.

Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day.  Aldrich and Howells were not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the old-fashioned black “string” tie, a Western survival), so they made him a present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford.  Next day he wrote: 

You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful —­Mrs. Clemens.  For months—­I may even say years—­she has shown an unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also getting so far as to threaten it.

When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.

It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more to the earlier mode.

Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of Clemens that night, for his photograph.  Clemens, returning to Hartford, put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea of sending one a week for a year.  Then he concluded that this was too slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to “His Grace of Ponkapog.”

Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested.  “The police,” he said, “are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort.”

On New-Year’s no less than twenty pictures came at once—­photographs and prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.  Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was known to the police as Mark Twain, alias “The Jumping Frog,” a well-known California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to Ponkapog to face his victim.  This letter was signed “T.  Bayleigh, Chief of Police,” and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the post-office had been blown up.  The jolly farce closed there.  It was the sort of thing that both men enjoyed.

Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western mining incident and environment.  He sent the manuscript to Clemens for “expert” consideration and advice.  Clemens wrote him at great length and in careful detail.  He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the most brilliant of men.  Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said: