er, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large
part of her time to study. For Jean, who was in love with every form
of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant
farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some
stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. Ossip Gabrilowitsch
was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been
invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely
appeared, even at meal-times. So it came about that there could hardly
have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this the
last year of Mark Twain's life. For me, of course, nothing can ever be
like it again in this world. One is not likely to associate twice with a
being from another star.

CCLXXXII. PERSONAL MEMORANDA

In the notes I made of this period I caught a little drift of
personality and utterance, and I do not know better how to preserve
these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence
and in the forth in which they were set down.

One of the first of these entries occurs in June, when Clemens was
rereading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White's Science and
Theology, which he called a lovely book.--['A History of the Warfare of
Science with Theology in Christendom'.]

June 21. A peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual,
resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to
Jean's farm-house. I picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark
about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in
nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution.

"Yes," he said, "those are the great evidences; no one who reasons
can doubt them."

And presently he added:

"That is a most amusing book of White's. When you read it you see
how those old theologians never reasoned at all. White tells of an
old bishop who figured out that God created the world in an instant
on a certain day in October exactly so many years before Christ, and
proved it. And I knew a preacher myself once who declared that the
fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. He
said that God could create the rocks with those fossils in them for
ornaments if He wanted to. Why, it takes twenty years to build a
little island in the Mississippi River, and that man actually
believed that God created the whol