He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value.  In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast.  But it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his praise.  In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him.  Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.  But in his own country it was different.  In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.  I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less.  He stopped as if with the long Semitic curve of Clemens’s nose, which in the indulgence of his passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced unmistakably racial.  It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends who accepted him with the English, the European entirety—­namely, Charles Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child.  Norton was then newly back from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized.  He met Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of his talk.  Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand, he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall have to tell by-and-by, almost solely.  I cannot say just why Clemens seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.

I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor.  I have an impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens’s instance in his own uncertainty about printing it.  She trusted me, I can say with a satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband’s true and cordial adviser, and I was so.  I believe I never failed him in this part, though in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking.  I believe this never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking, when I have entered upon it, holds