n her own way, year after year! If I had shown her that I
cared, she might have gone on with it. We are always too busy for our
children; we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve.
We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal
association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw
it away on those who care for it so little." Then, after a moment of
silence: "But we are repaid for it at last. There comes a time when we
want their company and their interest. We want it more than anything
in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were
starved so long ago. There is no appreciation of my books that is so
precious to me as appreciation from my children. Theirs is the praise we
want, and the praise we are least likely to get."

His moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times. He spoke of
Henry's death and little Langdon's, and charged himself with both.
He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens's life with
privations, that the sorrow of Susy's death had hastened her own end.
How darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had
been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of
tragedy.

But such moods were evanescent. He was oftener gay than somber. One
morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how
he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. An
artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most
amusing thing in the world. But he had not been satisfied with it, and
had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what
he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and
when he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence
had followed.

"A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine,"
he said, "and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it
seemed an hour and a half. Then a lady said, with evident feeling,
'Lord, how pathetic!' For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains
of my great deeps were broken up, and I rained laughter for forty
days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. By that time
I realized it was my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to
deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the
humorous explosion at the end; but I had constructed such a fog of
pathos that when I got to the humor