A WINTER IN BERMUDA

Edmund Clarence Stedman died suddenly at his desk, January 18, 1908, and Clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message: 

I do not wish to talk about it.  He was a valued friend from days that date back thirty-five years.  His loss stuns me and unfits me to speak.

He recalled the New England dinners which he used to attend, and where he had often met Stedman.

“Those were great affairs,” he said.  “They began early, and they ended early.  I used to go down from Hartford with the feeling that it wasn’t an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time.  Choate and Depew and Stedman were in their prime then—­we were all young men together.  Their speeches were always worth listening to.  Stedman was a prominent figure there.  There don’t seem to be any such men now —­or any such occasions.”

Stedman was one of the last of the old literary group.  Aldrich had died the year before.  Howells and Clemens were the lingering “last leaves.”

Clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and added the feature of “doe” luncheons—­pretty affairs where, with Clara Clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such as Mrs. Kate Douglas Riggs, Geraldine Farrax, Mrs. Robert Collier, Mrs. Frank Doubleday, and others.  I cannot report those luncheons, for I was not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too fragmentary a form to be used as history; but I gathered from Clemens himself that he had done all of the talking, and I think they must have been very pleasant afternoons.  Among the acknowledgments that followed one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from Mrs. Riggs: 

N. B.—­A lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of course, a doe.  The question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in succession is she a doe-doe?  If so is she extinct and can never attend a third?

Luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness to the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial attack, and toward the end of January he sailed away to Bermuda, where skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom.  His sojourn was brief this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full of happiness.  He had been driving about over the island with a newly adopted granddaughter, little Margaret Blackmer, whom he had met one morning in the hotel dining-room.  A part of his dictated story will convey here this pretty experience.

My first day in Bermuda paid a dividend—­in fact a double dividend:  it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection.  As I entered the breakfast-room the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two.  I bent down over her and patted her cheek and said: 

    “I don’t seem to remember your name; what is it?”