as a student. And Lord! to think that this boy, who is so real to
me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life,
and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame
and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the
world's eyes on him, and then----fzt! where is he? Why, the only
long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is
the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has
drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a
formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that
lie along its remote verge.

Well, we are all getting along here first-rate. Livy gains strength
daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----But no
more of this. Somebody may be reading this letter eighty years
hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding
this yellow paper in your hand in 1960), save yourself the trouble
of looking further. I know how pathetically trivial our small
concerns would seem to you, and I will not let your eye profane
them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you
to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind
now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these
many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh!
MARK.

It is the ageless story. He too had written his youthful letters, and
later had climbed the Alps of fame and was still outlined against the
sun. Happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the
unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age.

Mrs. Clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to
his:

"We are all going so fast. Pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred
years."

Clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on 'The Prince
and the Pauper' and on the story about 'Huck Finn', which he had begun
four years earlier.

He read the latter over and found in it a new interest. It did not
fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered
only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales.

He always took a boy's pride in the number of pages he could complete at
a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them triumphantly,
and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping do