n why & who is to
blame.

All the family send love to all of you, & best Christmas wishes for your
prosperity.

Affectionately, SAM.

CLXV. LETTERS, VISITS, AND VISITORS

There were many pleasanter things, to be sure. The farm life never
failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and
fair occasions. Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting. America, were
entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to
introduce Stanley to his lecture audience. Charles Dickens's son, with
his wife and daughter, followed a little later. An incident of their
visit seems rather amusing now. There is a custom in England which
requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a
lighted candle. Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the
courage to follow it in her own home, and the 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, a