I said, “How do you account for the changed attitude toward these things?  We are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and suffering.”

“Ah! but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the quality of compassion.  Relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax that quality and in two generations—­in one generation—­we should be gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same.  Why, I read somewhere a letter written just before the Lisbon catastrophe in 1755 about a scene on the public square of Lisbon:  A lot of stakes with the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning.  The square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with the enjoyment of the scene.  The Greeks don’t seem to have done these things.  I suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion.”

Colonel Harvey and Mr. Duneka came up to spend the night.  Mr. Clemens had one of his seizures during the evening.  They come oftener and last longer.  One last night continued for an hour and a half.  I slept there.

September 7.  To-day news of the North Pole discovered by Peary.  Five days ago the same discovery was reported by Cook.  Clemens’s comment:  “It’s the greatest joke of the ages.”  But a moment later he referred to the stupendous fact of Arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the sun.

September 21.  This morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had had just before wakening.  He said: 

“I was in an automobile going slowly, with ’a little girl beside me, and some uniformed person walking along by us.  I said, ’I’ll get out and walk, too’; but the officer replied, ’This is only one of the smallest of our fleet.’

“Then I noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two cannons mounted where the front should be.  I noticed, too, that we were traveling very low, almost down on the ground.  Presently we got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found myself walking ahead of the ’mobile.  I turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, ’This view beggars all admiration.’  Then all at once we were in a great group of people and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten’s remark, but when I tried to do it the words were so touching that I broke down and cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten’s moving remark.”

    The joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely
    ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came.