icy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the
whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.
XXII.
The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through
my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved
best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a
cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very
kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in
one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make
calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through
his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as
he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as
he did everything she wanted. 'At one place, some suburban villa, he
could get no answer to his ring, and he "hove" his cards over the gate
just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his
unexplanatory French to the man picking them up.
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