On the third morning, just before breakfast-time, Susy was practising at the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery.  At one end of the room a fire of large logs was burning.  Susy was at the other end of the room, her back to the fire.  A log burned in two and fell, scattering coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel.  Just as the blaze was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim Mr. Clemens’s hair, chanced to look in and saw what was going on.  He stepped into the nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the flames.  This period was always referred to in the Clemens household as the “three days of fire.”

Clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted.  He said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that Rosa and Julia and the barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property.  He did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of these things:  he never drew conclusions as to purpose.  He was willing to rest with the event.  Logically he did not believe in reasons for things, but only that things were.

Nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in their improvement.  Had you asked him, he would have said that this, too, was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been minutely embodied there.

In that charming volume, ‘My Mark Twain’, Howells tells us of Clemens’s consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to repair the wrong done by his nation.  Mark Twain’s writings are full of similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to the humbler race.  He would go across the street to speak to an old negro, and to take his hand.  He would read for a negro church when he would have refused a cathedral.  Howells mentions the colored student whose way through college Clemens paid as a partial reparation “due from every white man to every black man.”—­[Mark Twain paid two colored students through college.  One of them, educated in a Southern institution, became a minister of the gospel.  The other graduated from the Yale Law School.]—­This incident belongs just to the period of which we are now writing, and there is another which, though different enough, indicates the same tendency.

Garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that Frederick Douglass might lose his position as Marshal of the District of Columbia.  Clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence with the Administration, and in every case had refused.  Douglass had made no such, application.  Clemens, learning that the old negro’s place was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord.  He closed his letter to General Garfield: