Mark Twain’s own book on the subject—­’Is Shakespeare Dead?’—­found a wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers.  It contained no new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was certainly readable.—­[Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays.  One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis, we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given by Sothern and Marlowe.  At the close of one splendid scene he said, quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote.”]

Among the visitors who had come to Stormfield was Howells.  Clemens had called a meeting of the Human Race Club, but only Howells was able to attend.  We will let him tell of his visit: 

We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects.  Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it.  He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it.  The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close- knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines.  But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the Northern winter.  It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor.  We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger.  Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice.  Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on.  The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks.  Truly he loved the place . . . .

My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine.  Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness, and if I looked out of my door there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in