rvantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of
them was his equal in humanity.

IV.

Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect's connivance, a
luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was
given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his
stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk
together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he
discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room
at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship.
It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather
with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the
gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it
well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and,
without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke,
could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument
against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales
and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly
remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain
Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I
knew already from his many stories about him.

We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was
a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of
the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather
he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect
of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi
Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in
our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early
parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness,
but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting
juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.

I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly