Perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his entertainment.  His readings were mainly from his earlier books, ‘Roughing It’ and ‘Innocents Abroad’.  The story of the dead man which, as a boy, he had discovered in his father’s office was one that he often told, and the “Mexican Plug” and his “Meeting with Artemus Ward” and the story of Jim Blaine’s old ram; now and again he gave chapters from ’Huck Finn’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’.  He was likely to finish with that old fireside tale of his early childhood, the “Golden Arm.”  But he sometimes told the watermelon story, written for Mrs. Rogers, or gave extracts from Adam’s Diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it entirely where he appeared twice in one city.

Mrs. Clemens and Clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went when the hour of entertainment came:  They enjoyed seeing his triumph with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art.

One story, the “Golden Arm,” had in it a pause, an effective, delicate pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize its full value.  Somewhere before we have stated that no one better than Mark Twain knew the value of a pause.  Mrs. Clemens and Clara were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for its effect on each new, audience.

From Australia to New Zealand—­where Clemens had his third persistent carbuncle,—­[In Following the Equator the author says:  “The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel.  Humor is out of place in a dictionary."]—­and again lost time in consequence.  It was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell: 

I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city.  Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle—­& hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise.  Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue—­a foreign tongue—­a tongue bred among the ice-fields of the antarctic—­a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from.  It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night & find it still pulsing there.  I wish you were here—­land, but it would be fine!

Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark.

“I do not like it one single bit,” she wrote to her sister.  “Fifty years old-think of it; that seems very far on.”

And Clemens wrote: 

    Day before yesterday was Livy’s birthday (underworld time) &
    tomorrow will be mine.  I shall be 60—­no thanks for it!