guests knew of no other way
to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual.
Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like
to retire.

Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in to
visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh
Street. Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible,
and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk
down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk. They
discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their
talk could not have been preserved.

Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain's work. He said that during
a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck Finn
aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally
had fallen a complete victim to Huck's yarn. In one of Stevenson's
letters to Clemens he wrote:

My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It
(his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening
spent with the book he declared: "I am frightened. It cannot be
safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much."

What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious
some of them are! Many of them are requests of one sort or another,
chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income,
conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. Clemens seldom
answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of
unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go
merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. He
prepared an introduction for this series. In it he said:

. . . You receive a letter. You read it. It will be tolerably
sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure; 2, displeasure;
3, indifference. I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3;
everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed
No. 2 that I am after. It is the one that is loaded up with
trouble.

When you get an exasperating letter what happens? If you are young
you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have
written. At forty what do you do? By that time you have found out
that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred; that it usually wro