“Here is five cents to pay your way home.”  And I took it in the same spirit in which it had been offered.  It was probably this trait which caused some one occasionally to claim that Mark Twain was close in money matters.  Perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was parsimonious; but, if so, I must believe that it was when he was sorely pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation.  He wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and properties.  He took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was trying to get an unfair division of profits.  Then it became something besides greed.  It became an indignation that amounted to malevolence.  I was concerned in a number of dealings with Mark Twain, and at a period in his life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which is to say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or small, or greedy in his money dealings I think I should have seen it.  Personally, I found him liberal to excess, and I never observed in him anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him.

Once that winter, when a letter came from Steve Gillis saying that he was an invalid now, and would have plenty of tune to read Sam’s books if he owned them, Clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and did what meant to him even more than the cost in money—­he autographed each of those twenty-five volumes.  Then he sent them, charges paid, to that far Californian retreat.  It was hardly the act of a stingy man.

He had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from an authoritative source, and I remember how pleased he was that winter with Prof.  William Lyon Phelps’s widely published opinion, which ranked Mark Twain as the greatest American novelist, and declared that his fame would outlive any American of his time.  Phelps had placed him above Holmes, Howells, James, and even Hawthorne.  He had declared him to be more American than any of these—­more American even than Whitman.  Professor Phelps’s position in Yale College gave this opinion a certain official weight; but I think the fact of Phelps himself being a writer of great force, with an American freshness of style, gave it a still greater value.

Among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with Eugene F. Ware, of Kansas, with whose penname—­“Ironquill”—­Clemens had long been familiar.

Ware was a breezy Western genius of the finest type.  If he had abandoned law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached.  There was in his work that same spirit of Americanism and humor and humanity that is found in Mark Twain’s writings, and he had the added faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart.  I had known Ware personally during a period of Western residence, and later, when he was Commissioner of