The billiard-room became his headquarters.  He received his callers there and impressed them into the game.  If they could play, well and good; if they could not play, so much the better—­he could beat them extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests.  Every Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship.  Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards.  He was never tired of the game.  He could play all night.  He would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone.  He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table.  It amused him highly to do this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down.  S. C. Dunham was among those who belonged to the “Friday Evening Club,” as they called it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare Ned Bunce, and F. G. Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young.  Clemens quoted to them sometimes: 

    Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
    Your winter garment of repentance fling;
    The bird of time has but a little way
    To flutter, and the bird is on the wing.

Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene “eat, drink, and be merry” philosophy, in Fitzgerald’s rhyme, these were early converts.  Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited: 

    For some we loved, the loveliest and best
    That from his vintage rolling time has prest,
    Have drunk their cup a round or two before,
    And one by one crept silently to rest. 
    Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
    Before we too into the dust descend;
    Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie,
    Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and—­sans End.’

—­[The ‘Rubaiyat’ had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a little before in a column of extracts published in the Courant.] Twichell immediately wrote Clemens a card: 

“Read (if you haven’t) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page of this morning’s Courant.  I think we’ll have to get the book.  I never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so. adequately.  And it’s only a translation.  Read it, and we’ll talk it over.  There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read me last night, in fact identical with it in thought.

“Surely this Omar was a great poet.  Anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning.