Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season.  At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way.

It was a season that closed sadly.  Clemens was called to Keokuk in August, to his mother’s bedside, for it was believed that her end was near.  She rallied, and he returned to Onteora.  But on the 27th of October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest at his side.  She was in her eighty-eighth year.

The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own mother, in Elmira.  Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken suddenly ill he returned to Hartford.  Watching by the little girl’s bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a birthday letter, telling of Jean’s improved condition and sending other good news and as many loving messages as he could devise.  But it proved a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother’s gentle and beautiful soul went out from among them.  The foreboding she had felt at the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified.  She had a dread that the harvest of death was not yet ended.  Matters in general were going badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America, and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind.  Clemens, near the end of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said: 

    Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself
    before I die.

The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn Mawr.  Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long idleness, was hard.  A diversion was another portrait of himself, this time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg.  Clemens rather enjoyed portrait-sittings.  He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire information.  He liked to discuss any man’s profession with him, and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters.  Flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one.  Once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing.

“Never mind the apology,” said Clemens.  “The compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out.”

When Flagg’s portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane came to the studio to look at it.  Mrs. Clemens complained only that the necktie was crooked.