l
hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably
as he would if that man were in San Francisco."]
Mrs. Clemens, before I went there, took care of his desk, but little
by little I began to look after it when she was busy at other
things. Finally I took care of it altogether, but he didn't know it
for a long time. One morning he caught me at it. "What are you
doing here?" he asked.

"Dusting, Mr. Clemens," I said.

"You have no business here," he said, very mad.

"I've been doing it for a year, Mr. Clemens," I said. "Mrs. Clemens
told me to do it."

After that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he
would ring for me. "Katie," he would say, "you have lost that
manuscript."

"Oh, Mr. Clemens,", I would say, "I am sure I didn't touch it."

"Yes, you did touch it, Katie. You put it in the fire. It is
gone."

He would scold then, and fume a great deal. Then he would go over
and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which I was never to
cross. "Katie," he would say, "you are never to go nearer to my
desk than that line. That is the dead-line." Often after he had
scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where I
was dressing Mrs. Clemens to go out and say, "Katie, I found that
manuscript." And I would say, "Mr. Clemens, I felt so bad this
morning that I wanted to go away."

He had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf. It was an
awful old dirty one, and I didn't know that he ever used it. I took
it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it
away as far as I could throw it. Next day he asked, "Katie, did you
see my pipe-cleaner? You did see it; I can tell by your looks."

I said, "Yes, Mr. Clemens, I threw it away."

"Well," he said, "it was worth a thousand dollars," and it seemed so
to me, too, before he got done scolding about it.

It is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period. One
would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings
alone. They remained always fresh in Mark Twain's memory. Once he wrote
of them:

We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to
eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a
sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas-
light from the ground floor up, the guests