“Stop, Mr. Clemens, Helen is distressed because she did not recognize your hand.  Won’t you come back and do that again?” I went back and patted her lightly on the head, and she said at once, “Oh, it’s Mr. Clemens.”

    Perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but I have never been
    able to do it.  Could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her
    hair?  Some one else must answer this.

It was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a very simple and rather amusing solution.  Helen had come to pay a visit to Mark Twain’s Connecticut home, Stormfield, then but just completed.  He had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask her how she had recognized him that morning at Hutton’s, in what had seemed such a marvelous way.  She remembered, and with a smile said: 

“I smelled you.”  Which, after all, did not make the incident seem much less marvelous.

On one of the mornings after Miss Hobby had gone Clemens said: 

“A very curious thing has happened—­a very large-sized-joke.”  He was shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken relays, suited to a performance of that sort.  The reader may perhaps imagine the effect without further indication of it.

“I was going on a yachting trip once, with Henry Rogers, when a reporter stopped me with the statement that Mrs. Astor had said that there had never been a gentleman in the White House, and he wanted me to give him my definition of a gentleman.  I didn’t give him my definition; but he printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper.  I was angry at first, and wanted to bring a damage suit.  When I came to read the definition it was a satisfactory one, and I let it go.  Now to-day comes a letter and a telegram from a man who has made a will in Missouri, leaving ten thousand dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the State, on which shall be inscribed Mark Twain’s definition of a gentleman.  He hasn’t got the definition—­he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it.  I couldn’t think, when I read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came to me.”

It was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no conclusion in the matter.  Another telegram was brought in just then, which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old coachman, Patrick McAleer, who had begun in the Clemens service with the bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could not survive more than a few days.  This led him to speak of Patrick, his noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad.  Clemens gave orders that everything possible should be done for Patrick’s comfort.  When the end came, a few days later, he traveled to Hartford to lay flowers on Patrick’s bier, and to serve, with Patrick’s friends —­neighbor coachmen and John O’Neill, the gardener—­as pall-bearer, taking his allotted place without distinction or favor.