odgment for
themselves in that secluded corner of New England. Clemens wrote
without delay, as follows:

*****

To R. W. Gilder, in New York:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
June 7, '04.

DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what to
do: at last I went to the girls with an idea: to ask the Gilders to get
us shelter near their summer home. It was the first time they have not
shaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope to
be in time.

An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine went silent
out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way. She
who is gone was our head, she was our hands. We are now trying to make
plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. If
she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word,
and our perplexities would vanish away. If she had known she was near to
death she would have told us where to go and what to do: but she was not
suspecting, neither were we. (She had been chatting cheerfully a moment
before, and in an instant she was gone from us and we did not know it.
We were not alarmed, we did not know anything had happened. It was a
blessed death--she passed away without knowing it.) She was all our
riches and she is gone: she was our breath, she was our life and now we
are nothing.

We send you our love--and with it the love of you that was in her heart
when she died.

S. L. CLEMENS.

Howells wrote his words of sympathy, adding: "The character which
now remains a memory was one of the most perfect ever formed on the
earth," and again, after having received Clemens's letter: "I cannot
speak of your wife's having kept that letter of mine where she did.
You know how it must humiliate a man in his unworthiness to have
anything of his so consecrated. She hallowed what she touched, far
beyond priests."

*****

To W. D. Howells, in New York:

VILLA DI QUARTO, '04.
June 12, 6 p. m.

DEAR HOWELLS,--We have to sit and hold our hands and wait--in the
silence and solitude of this prodigious house; wait until June 25, then
we go to Naples and sail in the Prince Oscar the 26th. There is a
ship 12 days earlier