nd of
the room a fire of large logs was burning. Susy was at the other end of
the room, her back to the fire. A log burned in two and fell, scattering
coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel. Just as the blaze
was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim Mr. Clemens's hair,
chanced to look in and saw what was going on. He stepped into the
nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the
flames. This period was always referred to in the Clemens household as
the "three days of fire."

Clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these
coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted. He
said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the
first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote
time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the
spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not
have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that Rosa and Julia and the
barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property. He
did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of these
things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose. He was willing to rest
with the event. Logically he did not believe in reasons for things, but
only that things were.

Nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in
their improvement. Had you asked him, he would have said that this, too,
was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been
minutely embodied there.

In that charming volume, 'My Mark Twain', Howells tells us of Clemens's
consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to
repair the wrong done by his nation. Mark Twain's writings are full of
similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to
pay tribute to the humbler race. He would go across the street to speak
to an old negro, and to take his hand. He would read for a negro church
when he would have refused a cathedral. Howells mentions the colored
student whose way through college Clemens paid as a partial reparation
"due from every white man to every black man."--[Mark Twain paid two
colored students through college. One of them, educated in a Southern
institution, became a minister of the gospel. The other graduated from
the Yale Law School.]--This incident belongs just to the period of which
we are now writing, and there is