others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens then liked him to be.  He could interpret Clemens’s meaning to the public without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth to the person denied his presence.  His general instructions were that this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens.  Upon inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said, “You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn’t come down to see the Twelve Apostles.”  George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself, and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith away content with himself and all the rest of the world.

The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.  No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal.  He held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black man.  He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro.  About that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of conduct “unbecoming an officer and gentleman,” and there was the usual shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro could never feel the claim of honor.  The man was fifteen parts white, but, “Oh yes,” Clemens said, with bitter irony, “it was that one part black that undid him.”  It made him a “nigger” and incapable of being a gentleman.  It was to blame for the whole thing.  The fifteen parts white were guiltless.

Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.  He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that “it was not yet time” to philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must “wait till its passions had cooled,” and “the clouds of strife had cleared away.”  He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity.  Picturesquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on fable.