till we could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our neighborhood knew.  Naturally there was no policeman known to us or unknown the whole way to the Public Garden.  We had to circumvent our charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the streets crossing Beacon to the river.  At these points it needed considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring in both of us to enforce our arguments.  Nobody else appeared to be interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to be so entirely ignored.

There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it.  Still the expected policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to Clemens.  He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge of our hapless ward.  All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked design.  After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview.  He took possession of our captive, and we saw her no more.  I now wonder that with our joint instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and few things in life have given me greater relief.  When we got back to my house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure.  My impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay; but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.

XVII.

A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived several years in Germany.  His letters still came, but at longer intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken.  He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious profanity.  During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home.  In Berlin also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a cousin married to a high officer of the court.  Clemens was a man to enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated recognition from