It was very soon after that that Peter Dunne ("Mr. Dooley”) came down for luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, Clemens quietly—­as if the idea had just occurred to him—­rolled out the twelve balls and asked Dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without a miss.  Dunne said he thought he could make a thousand.  Clemens quite indifferently said that he didn’t believe he could make fifty.  Dunne offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made.  Dunne scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until Clemens had twenty-five dollars of Dunne’s money, and Dunne was sweating and swearing, and Mark Twain rocking with delight.  Dunne went away still unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again.  Perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned something.  He won his twenty-five dollars back, and I think something more added.  Mark Twain was still ahead, for Dunne furnished him with a good five hundred dollars’ worth of amusement.

Clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the game was actually in progress.  If there was anything to be said on either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on the couch, until the matter was concluded.  Such interruptions happened pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests.  Some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and awaken a note long silent, and I generally kept a pad and pencil on the window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, I would scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by.

On one of these I find a memorandum of what he called his three recurrent dreams.  All of us have such things, but his seem worth remembering.

“There is never a month passes,” he said, “that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living.  It is never a pleasant dream, either.  I love to think about those days; but there’s always something sickening about the thought that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.

“Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform.  I hate that dream worse than the other.  In it I am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only making silly jokes.  Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave.  That dream always ends by my standing there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house.