ry well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in
whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was
where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a
theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.

Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He
went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in
visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of
failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: "Here is
a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor
known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We
are fools." Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he
agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the
stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But
Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and
title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of
one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York; and yet I
think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the
faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.

VII.

There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I
will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to
Hartford in response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in
Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at
home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. "Oh, but
he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "He likes Mr. Clemens very
much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him one of the greatest
men he ever knew." I was still Clemens's guest at Hartford when Arnold
came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception.
While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed
intensely on the other side of the room. "Who-who in the world is that?"
I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain." I do not remember just how
their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish, but I have the
impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the
next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent prese