He had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his natural attitudes.  I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I obtained his permission to let me photograph him—­a permission he seldom denied to any one.  We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings.  He was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives.  I was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done.  I think he expected very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than I had hoped for.  When I brought him the prints, a few days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, “Why didn’t you make more?”

Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction.  It being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result.  He spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since.

“Sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when Du Chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight.  I said it was, and Sarony was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine.  It turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine; but it’s not my favorite; I have tried to get it suppressed.”

Mark Twain made his first investment in Redding that spring.  I had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price.  I was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the situation.  His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that I buy it for him; and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost.  I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from New York, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means.  The purchase was made without difficulty—­a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently still