saying that this incident had come to our knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to withhold the money.  Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our beneficiary.  But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him.  He acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys withheld.  At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself.  Clouds of sorrow had gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him, and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the first place.  Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the matter.  He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was, who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt.  He reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred to the incident.  It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.

XXIII.

During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the last time at Riverdale.  He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens’s window, where we could read our manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out without disturbing her.  At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time I spoke with her.  After that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun.  He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people’s memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story.  The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the Ms. will yet be found.  Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I have mentioned.  The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own concerning them.  Not only does he seem to have read me those first chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole story.