he steamer, Twichell
made an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and
her daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining Mark
Twain.

"Did you ever hear of Mark Twain?" asked Twichell.

The daughter answered.

"Yes," she said, "until I'm tired of the name. I know a young man who
never talks of anything else."

"Well," said Twichell, "that gentleman with me is Mark Twain."

The Kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep
sorrow that they had not known it earlier. Twichell promised that he
and Clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we
always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they
returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead.

On the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks,
trying to get to New York. She had no cargo and was pretty helpless.
Later, when she was reported again, Clemens wrote about it in a Hartford
paper, telling the story as he knew it. The vessel had shipped the crew,
on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor. So it was a
"pleasure-excursion!" Clemens dwelt on this fancy:

I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the
list. It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I
should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his
venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners
tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn
solitudes of the ocean.

Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting
with the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time;
one would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out.

That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain. To
Twichell he wrote that it was the "joyousest trip" he had ever made:

Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. I often come
to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that
had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we
had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four.

There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them. Clemens
denounced him for his absence:

If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the
trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would
cost, I would have picked up eno