is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary, I
do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed. He can grow
up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.

It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time. They have to
put in some little time every day on their studies. Jean thinks she is
studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses;
she spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a
continuation of her Hartford system of culture.

With love from us all to you all.

Affectionately
SAM.

Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.
Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve
Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. He had a passion for
history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort. In his early life
he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties
he somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it. A
Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in
Hartford to listen to his readings of the master. He was an impressive
reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions,
indicating by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to
give to words and phrases. Those were memorable gatherings, and they
must have continued through at least two winters. It is one of the
puzzling phases of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his
passion for direct and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure
in the poems of Robert Browning.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

ELMIRA, Aug. 22, '87.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man
while he sleeps. When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871,
I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it
differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and
environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down
once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel
so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did
at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so.