ied, promising that he would come back and try it again.
Perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned
something. He won his twenty-five dollars back, and I think something
more added. Mark Twain was still ahead, for Dunne furnished him with a
good five hundred dollars' worth of amusement.

Clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the
game was actually in progress. If there was anything to be said on
either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on
the couch, until the matter was concluded. Such interruptions happened
pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident
scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests.
Some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and
awaken a note long silent, and I generally kept a pad and pencil on the
window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, I would
scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by.

On one of these I find a memorandum of what he called his three
recurrent dreams. All of us have such things, but his seem worth
remembering.

"There is never a month passes," he said, "that I do not dream of being
in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn
a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about
those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought
that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I
am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell
whether it is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.

"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to
the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am
always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to
be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only
making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they
commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing
there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house.

"My other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my
night-garments. People don't seem to notice me there at first, and then
pretty soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me
suspiciously, and I can see that they are wondering who I am and why
I am there in that costume. Then it occurs to me that I can