force our arguments. Nobody else appeared to be
interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of
the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to
be so entirely ignored.

There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon
Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were
pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected
policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to
Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I
told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge
of our hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the
utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in
early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her
personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked
design. After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to
get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation
with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of
Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. He took possession
of our captive, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with our joint
instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and
few things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my
house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much
concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he
had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay;
but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.

XVII.

A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived
several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer
intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably
broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or
when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social
outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious
profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in
Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin
also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a
cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a deleg