about it.)

It nearly took my breath away, though I thought I might possibly
have misunderstood. I said:

"Why, you little rascal! Was hast du gesagt?"

But she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way.
I suppose I ought to have been outraged, but I wasn't; I was
charmed.

His own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are
fewer literary ideas and more philosophies. There was an excitement,
just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda
says:

I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood
of some vast creature's veins, and that it is that vast creature
whom God concerns himself about and not us.

And there is another which says:

People, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by
learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the
myriads of stars. We sha'n't need that. We could use up two
eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own
world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished,
and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight
million years.

He records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to
Howells:

Before I forget it I must tell you that Mrs. Clemens has said a
bright thing. A drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here
for a church debt. I began to rage over the exceedingly cool
wording of the request, when Mrs. Clemens said: "I think I know that
church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn't know
how to write a polished letter. How should he?"

My manner changed so suddenly and so radically that Mrs. C. said: "I
will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will
adopt it: 'Consider every man colored till he is proved white.'"

It is dern good, I think.

One of the note-books contains these entries:

Talking last night about home matters, I said, "I wish I had said to
George when we were leaving home, 'Now, George, I wish you would
take advantage of these three or four months' idle time while I am
away----'"

"To learn to let my matches alone," interrupted Livy. The very
words I was going to use. Yet George had not been mentioned before,
nor his peculiarities.

Several years ago I said:

"Suppose I should live to be ninety-two, and just as I was dying a