re 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 delegated
recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop
sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he
was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as
between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer
such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in
the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before,
where there was a "little Scotch lord" present, to whom the English
tacitly referred Clemens's talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and
were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was
the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the
flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not
go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved
the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive
perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say,
and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest
sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he
was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely
existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful
fools who through some chance of birth or w