He was excruciatingly
helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting
himself on the drivers' mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some
small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him
to do what the cat might.

It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
look and limb, that Clemens's universally pervasive popularity began in
his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this
that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
"the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people to
keep it up here as they do in England." But it appeared that his
countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of
him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital
things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove
with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so
exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing
himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens's health alone that
they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived
there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should
change for his wife's sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was
not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would
have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture
into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it
from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any
man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was
creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the
mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made
itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly
waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
tenderly: "What? What?" as if it might be an asking for him instead of
the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if
indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I
said how be