How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps!  When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871 I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it differently—­being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!—­And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.  Carlyle teaches no such gospel, so the change is in me—­in my vision of the evidences.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey.  I wonder how they can lie so.  It comes of practice, no doubt.  They would not say that of Dickens’s or Scott’s books.  Nothing remains the same.  When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the picture in memory & imagination call for.  Shrunk how?  Why, to its correct dimensions; the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that’s loss.  To have house & Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss—­for a moment.  But there are compensations.  You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets & comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into the field.  Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi.  I haven’t got him in focus yet, but I’ve got Browning.

In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at regular intervals at the Clemens home to study “der, die, and das” and the “gehabt habens” out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as Professor Schleutter could provide.  They had monthly conversation days, when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary.  Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over painting a house, in which they impersonated two German neighbors.

Clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play “Meisterschaft”—­a literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its picturesque mixture of German and English and its unfailing humor.  It seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since.  No one but Mark Twain could have written it.  It was given twice by the class with enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the Century Magazine (January, 1888).  It is included to-day in his “Complete Works,” but one must have a fair knowledge of German to capture the full delight of it.—­[On the original manuscript Mark Twain wrote:  “There is some tolerably rancid German here and there in this piece.  It is attributable to the proof-reader.”  Perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it out, for it does not appear as published.]