were too many business complications; also the health of
Clemens's mother had become very feeble. They went to Tannersville in
the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler
had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with
a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. The Clemenses
secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence
Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber
Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark
Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet.

It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting
from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and
Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades,
in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy
Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to
rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave
impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. When Fourth of July came there
were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that
lighthearted company took part. Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered
in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he
told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought them up
with the same old jump at the sudden climax. Brander Matthews remembers
that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on business
connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of
these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course
of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens and the
girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. Matthews also
remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go
barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite
of the colony.

Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright
articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and
asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season.
At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a
cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way.

It was a season that closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in
August, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was
near. She rallied, an