vital things to speak of.  He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so exhaustless and was so exhausting.  His friends saw that he was wearing himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens’s health alone that they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale.  The family lived there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should change for his wife’s sake to some less exacting climate.  Clemens was not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole.  He got what pleasure any man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was creeping up his life.  One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud.  A hand frailly waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly:  “What?  What?” as if it might be an asking for him instead of the greeting it really was for me.  It was the last time I saw her, if indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice:  “Oh, why didn’t you ever tell her?  She thought you didn’t like her.”  What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her?  His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.

To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh forgotten his wrath when it come out.  There was also one of those joint episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire failure, as most of our joint episodes did.  He wrote furiously to me of a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in recovering the money paid over by that brother’s publisher to a false friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it.  Our hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he proposed sending to the false friend.  For once I had some sense, and answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer give me satisfaction,