ed that no one better than
Mark Twain knew the value of a pause. Mrs. Clemens and Clara were
willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for
its effect on each new, audience.

From Australia to New Zealand--where Clemens had his third persistent
carbuncle,--[In Following the Equator the author says: "The dictionary
says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a
dictionary."]--and again lost time in consequence. It was while he was
in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell:

I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here
at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city.
Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with
nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle--& hardly a
suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. Away
down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to
murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred
among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of
melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come
from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night &
find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here--land, but it
would be fine!

Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens
turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark.

"I do not like it one single bit," she wrote to her sister. "Fifty years
old-think of it; that seems very far on."

And Clemens wrote:

Day before yesterday was Livy's birthday (underworld time) &
tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60--no thanks for it!

From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away to
Ceylon. Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color,
enchantment, and gentle races. Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when
they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his
health as good as that of his companions. The papers usually spoke of
him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not
remain in India until the time of the great heat. He was so determined
to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared
himself.

He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of
India--from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling,
to Lahore, to Lucknow, to De