Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew did the like for me in English, & then the fun began.  Coquelin did some excellent French monologues—­one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French.  It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it.

I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his darling imitations, Handing Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever, which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast fascinating (for what reason I don’t know) of all Kipling’s poems, “On the Road to Mandalay,” sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper & charmed me more than the Deever.

Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all danced about an hour.  There couldn’t be a pleasanter night than that one was.  Some of those people complained of fatigue, but I don’t seem to know what the sense of fatigue is.

In his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty.

He refers to Susy’s recent illness and to Mrs. Clemens’s own poor state of health.

    Dear, dear Susy!  My strength reproaches me when I think of her and
    you.

It is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, I’ve got to stick right where I am till I find out whether we are rich or whether the poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody’s kitchen is better off than we are. .  I stand on the land-end of a springboard, with the family clustered on the other end; if I take my foot——­

He realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he wrote: 

    The ship is in sight now ....

    When the anchor is down then I shall say: 

    “Farewell—­a long farewell—­to business!  I will never touch it
    again!”

    I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will
    swim in ink!  ’Joan of Arc’—­but all this is premature; the anchor
    is not down yet.

Sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope.  Mrs. Clemens, writing to her sister in January, said: 

Mr. Clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me word that Paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no despatch comes . . . .  On the 5th of this month I received a cable, “Expect good news in ten days.”  On the 15th I receive a cable, “Look out for good news.”  On the 19th a cable, “Nearing success.”

It appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days.  She added: 

    They make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved “Colonel.”

Mr. Rogers had agreed that he would bring Paige to rational terms, and with Clemens made a trip to Chicago.  All agreed now that the machine promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody could be concluded—­Paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and dicker as to terms.  Finally a telegram came from Chicago saying that Paige had agreed to terms.  On that day Clemens wrote in his note-book: