up a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it before we regained our courage for the undertaking.  With all these precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left with it on our hands intact.  I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt detection.

XI.

From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens’s affection for me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises.  I have fancied that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired faith.  He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end, and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to another.  Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was preoccupied in a flirtation with a “gentleman friend,” that emulous of the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did so.  He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities.  She was threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought back assurance of its acceptance.  I felt able to give this, and, of course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval.  Another time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book.  Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book.  The patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to comment, “I suppose you will report this fellow.”  “Yes,” he answered, slowly and sadly.  “That’s what I should have done once.  But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month.”

Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not for humanity alone.  He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might