XXII.

The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:  our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the earth.  I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.

Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris early in the summer of 1904.  The first thing I got at my bankers was a cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread.  Clemens was very kind and brotherly through it all.  He was living greatly to his mind in one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free from all household duties to range with me.  We drove together to make calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out.  But, as he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as he did everything she wanted.  ’At one place, some suburban villa, he could get no answer to his ring, and he “hove” his cards over the gate just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his unexplanatory French to the man picking them up.  He was excruciatingly helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting himself on the drivers’ mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.  The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him to do what the cat might.

It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in look and limb, that Clemens’s universally pervasive popularity began in his own country.  He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider “the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn’t expect people to keep it up here as they do in England.”  But it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent.  One does not go into a catalogue of dinners, receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more