d the world; and, besides, what Satan showed him
was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one
should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company,
with a gallon of kerosene."

He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that
hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons
always exactly on schedule time. "The Great Law" was a phrase often on
his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of
color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the Great
Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations throughout
all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but
only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for preservation:

From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong &
misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human
blessedness.

No "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions
by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures.

CCLXIV

CITIZEN AND FARMER

The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily. Clemens
kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates of
arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters he
diligently did it himself after they were gone.

Members of the Harper Company came up with their wives; "angel-fish" swam
in and out of the aquarium; Bermuda friends came to see the new home;
Robert Collier, the publisher, and his wife--"Mrs. Sally," as Clemens
liked to call her--paid their visits; Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting
America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed with the
architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country-place
he was about to build in Newfoundland. Helen Keller, with Mr. and Mrs.
Macy, came up for a week-end visit. Mrs. Crane came over from Elmira;
and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his childhood,
little Laura Hawkins--Laura Frazer now, widowed and in the seventies,
with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up.

That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from
a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October:

I've grown young in these months of dissipation here. And I have
left off drinking--it isn't necessary now. Society & theology are
sufficient for me.

To Helen Allen, a Bermuda "