lves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them;
nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by
reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it
myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the
form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But
perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.

XVI.

Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together
without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We
were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor
Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously
impersonal interest, "Oh, see that woman getting into the water!" This
would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than
ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and
back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door,
and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately
getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.
Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and
stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon
as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild
creature on our hands. She was not very young and not very pretty, and
we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything
romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human
level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we
could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our
neighborhood knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to us or
unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We had to circumvent our
charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the
streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed
considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring
in both of us to en