ll to mind,
when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely
picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked.
They came back and said he was beautiful. It was so, too, and yet
he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day
these past seven years that he has occupied this farm.

Lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph
of rare native loftiness:

But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine Providence saw fit
to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives,
the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.

Lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the Clemens and
Langdon households, for twenty-nine years. When he was too old to work
there was a pension, to which Clemens contributed; also Henry H. Rogers.
So the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace.

Mrs. Crane, in a letter, late in July, 1906, told of his death:

He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told
stories, and was able to eat almost everything.

Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his
doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite
impossible to give in his home.

He died on his way there.

Thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his
great deed.

A second unusual incident of that summer occurred in Hartford. There had
been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to
be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A
little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a
mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had
given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When
the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was
her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind
and no longer wished to marry her.

The girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the
first and about the only feeling which Clemens developed, for the time
being. He reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway.
Finally his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which
would have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. He asked Twichell to procure
a license for the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground flo