philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro
could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white,
but, "Oh yes," Clemens said, with bitter irony, "it was that one part
black that undid him." It made him a "nigger" and incapable of being a
gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white
were guiltless.

Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to
philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till
its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away." He
maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives
and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to
ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he
portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
fable.

He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had
been in California at the beginning of Clemens's career, and had
witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it,
once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down
on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful,
not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the
source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of
ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.

X.

I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in
the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, "The
ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it," and he gave his
guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not
go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of
sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of
the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house
stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed
the leaves of the trees that alm