and
it was long before she could be comforted. But Ellerslie in time
satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the nucleus around
which the children's summer happiness centered.

To their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven. Once to
Orion's wife Clemens wrote:

This is a superb Sunday . . . .

The city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at
the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas-
curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest)
point; the cats are loafing over at Ellerslie, which is the
children's estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds
(by deed from Susie Crane), a hundred yards from the study, among
the clover and young oaks and willows. Livy is down at the house,
but I shall now go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy
the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills
and valley and city is seeable. The children have gone on a lark
through the neighboring hills and woods, Susie and Clara horseback
and Jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and
assistant at need. It is a perfect day indeed.

The ending of each year's summer brought only regret. Clemens would
never take away all his things. He had an old superstition that to leave
some article insured return. Mrs. Clemens also left something--her
heart's content. The children went around bidding various objects
good-by and kissed the gates of Ellerslie too.

CLVIII

MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY

Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events
of that year. There was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly
messages, and The Critic, then conducted by Jeannette and Joseph Gilder,
made a feature of it. Miss Gilder wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes and
invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent,
though in his accompanying note he said:

"I had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all
marked immediate, when your note came."

Dr. Holmes's stanzas are full of his gentle spirit:

TO MARK TWAIN

(On his fiftieth birthday)

Ah, Clemens, when I saw thee last,
We both of us were younger;
How fondly mumbling o'er the past
Is Memory's toothless hunger!

So fifty years have fled, they say,