Winter came.  The walks were fewer, and there was even more company; the house was gay and the billiard games protracted.  In February I made a trip to Europe and the Mediterranean, to go over some of his ground there.  Returning in April, I found him somewhat changed.  It was not that he had grown older, or less full of life, but only less active, less eager for gay company, and he no longer dictated, or very rarely.  His daughter Jean, who had been in a health resort, was coming home to act as his secretary, and this made him very happy.  We resumed our games, our talks, and our long walks across the fields.  There were few guests, and we were together most of the day and evening.  How beautiful the memory of it all is now!  To me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world.

Mark Twain walked slowly these days.  Early in the summer there appeared indications of the heart trouble that less than a year later would bring the end.  His doctor advised diminished smoking, and forbade the old habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs.  The trouble was with the heart muscles, and at times there came severe deadly pains in his breast, but for the most part he did not suffer.  He was allowed the walk, however, and once I showed him a part of his estate he had not seen before—­a remote cedar hillside.  On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line.  I told him I was going to build a study on it and call it “Markland.”  I think the name pleased him.  Later he said: 

“If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine” (the Rogers table, which had been left in storage in New York), “I would turn it over to you.”

I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit the table, and he said: 

“Now that will be very good.  Then when I want exercise I can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me.  You must build that study.”

So it was planned, and the work was presently under way.

How many things we talked of!  Life, death, the future—­all the things of which we know so little and love so much to talk about.  Astronomy, as I have said, was one of his favorite subjects.  Neither of us had any real knowledge of the matter, which made its great facts all the more awesome.  The thought that the nearest fixed star was twenty-five trillions of miles away—­two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance to our own remote sun—­gave him a sort of splendid thrill.  He would figure out those appalling measurements of space, covering sheets of paper with his sums, but he was not a good mathematician, and the answers were generally wrong.  Comets in particular interested him, and one day he said: 

   “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835.  It is coming again next
   year, and I expect to go out with it.  It will be the greatest
   disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet.”