Clemens and his wife were always privately assisting worthy and ambitious young people along the way of achievement.  Young actors were helped through dramatic schools; young men and women were assisted through college and to travel abroad.  Among others Clemens paid the way of two colored students, one through a Southern institution and another through the Yale law school.

The mention of the name of Gerhardt in the preceding letter introduces the most important, or at least the most extensive, of these benefactions.  The following letter gives the beginning of the story: 

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Private and Confidential. 
                                        Hartford, Feb. 21, 1881. 
My dear Howells,—­Well, here is our romance.

It happened in this way.  One morning, a month ago—­no, three weeks —­Livy, and Clara Spaulding and I were at breakfast, at 10 A.M., and I was in an irritable mood, for the barber was up stairs waiting and his hot water getting cold, when the colored George returned from answering the bell and said:  “There’s a lady in the drawing-room wants to see you.”  “A book agent!” says I, with heat.  “I won’t see her; I will die in my tracks, first.”

Then I got up with a soul full of rage, and went in there and bent scowling over that person, and began a succession of rude and raspy questions—­and without even offering to sit down.

Not even the defendant’s youth and beauty and (seeming) timidity were able to modify my savagery, for a time—­and meantime question and answer were going on.  She had risen to her feet with the first question; and there she stood, with her pretty face bent floorward whilst I inquired, but always with her honest eyes looking me in the face when it came her turn to answer.

And this was her tale, and her plea-diffidently stated, but straight-forwardly; and bravely, and most winningly simply and earnestly:  I put it in my own fashion, for I do not remember her words: 

Mr. Karl Gerhardt, who works in Pratt & Whitney’s machine shops, has made a statue in clay, and would I be so kind as to come and look at it, and tell him if there is any promise in it?  He has none to go to, and he would be so glad.

“O, dear me,” I said, “I don’t know anything about art—­there’s nothing I could tell him.”

But she went on, just as earnestly and as simply as before, with her plea—­and so she did after repeated rebuffs; and dull as I am, even I began by and by to admire this brave and gentle persistence, and to perceive how her heart of hearts was in this thing, and how she couldn’t give it up, but must carry her point.  So at last I wavered, and promised in general terms that I would come down the first day that fell idle—­and as I conducted her to the door, I tamed more and more, and said I would come during the very next week—­“We