im to
humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most
original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by
incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church,
proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's
humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston
authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription
publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the
prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands
in completed sale. Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he said, "It sells right
along just like the Bible," and 'Roughing It' was swiftly following,
without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured
Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade
which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
"Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that
on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume
adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as
we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but
by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we
could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it
best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
opulence.

III.

The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
Warner's European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me
a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had
gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not
be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after
we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
the waters under the earth. After two days of t