scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy.  We said it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library, but a literature.  It should make good the world’s loss through Omar’s barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was really done on a colossal scale.  But one day he said that as to veracity it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could.  How far he had carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it, and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these.  It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence.  Whether now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means of knowing.  Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be minimized for all the survivors.  Suddenly he told me he was not working at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely dropped it; I never asked.

We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we did not see each other often.  He expected me to come to him, and I would not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends, and good friends, so far as I know.  I joked him once as to how I was going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of joking reassurance.  There was one incident, however, that brought us very frequently and actively together.  He came one Sunday afternoon to have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few streets above mine.  We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian sympathizers in this republic.  But I had lived through the episode of Kossuth’s visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the “oppressed of Europe”; the oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not count.  I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high.  I had already refused to sign the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced in Gorky’s presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused.  The next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human nature.