s
all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the Northern
winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and
meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the
last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and
down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and
talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for
the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now
we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together
across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where
the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses;
and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the
shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to
give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have
me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had
asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the
place....

My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his
part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him
sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for
the fondness, and if I looked out of my door there he was in his
long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his
great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the
hope of frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugar-snow
had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the
station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's
father when they were first married, and had been kept all those
intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[This
carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to Mrs. Crane when
the Hartford house was closed. When Stormfield was built she
returned it to its original owner.]--Its springs had not grown
yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age;
but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the
negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor when those
wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward.

Howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration. Clemens started to write
him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volum