I can’t sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow
    afternoon to play for me.  My God!  I wouldn’t allow Paderewski or
    Gabrilowitsch to do that.  I would rather have a leg amputated. 
    I knew he was coming, but I never dreamed it was to play for me. 
    When I heard the horrible news 4 hours ago, be d—–­d if I didn’t
    come near screaming.  I meant to slip out and be absent, but now I
    can’t.  Don’t pray for me.  The thing is just as d—–­d bad as it can
    be already.

Clemens’s love for music did not include the piano, except for very gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a professional player.  He did not report the sequel of the matter; but it is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures.  Sometimes his letters were pure nonsense.  Once he sent a sheet, on one side of which was written: 

Bayhouse,
March s, 1910. 
Received of S. L. C.
Two Dollars and Forty Cents
in return for my promise to believe everything he says
hereafter. 
Helen S. Allen.

and on the reverse: 

For sale

The proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned Promise desires to part with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres so as to let it recipricate, and will take any reasonable amount for it above 2 percent of its face because experienced parties think it will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a kind of proppity that don’t give a cuss for cold storage nohow.

Clearly, however serious Mark Twain regarded his physical condition, he did not allow it to make him gloomy.  He wrote that matters were going everywhere to his satisfaction; that Clara was happy; that his household and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal surroundings were of the pleasantest sort.  Sometimes he wrote of what he was reading, and once spoke particularly of Prof.  William Lyon Phelps’s Literary Essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he had finished the book.—­[To Phelps himself he wrote:  “I thank you ever so much for the book, which I find charming—­so charming, indeed, that I read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night’s sleep.  I am glad if I deserve what you have said about me; & even if I don’t I am proud & well contented, since you think I deserve it.”]

So his days seemed full of comfort.  But in March I noticed that he generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small photographs I thought he looked thinner and older.  Still he kept up his merriment.  In one letter he said: