nest.
Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their
subject-matter to require anything at his hand. Here and there are
marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and
circumstance.

There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old
copy of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies;
but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked
passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint
record which, perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted
most.

Francis Parkman's Canadian Histories he had read periodically,
especially the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North
America. As late as January, 1908, he wrote on the title-page of the Old
Regime:

Very interesting. It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane
came over from France and colonized Canada.

He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize
the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their
courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the
fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. "What manner of
men are these?" he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had
undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could
devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to
"dare again the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois." Clemens was
likely to be on the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism.
In one place he wrote:

That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure
what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the
road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should
want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow
cannot grasp.

Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read
them--read and digested every word and line. There were two volumes
of Lecky, much worn; Andrew D. White's 'Science and Theology'--a chief
interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn
copy of 'Modern English Literature--Its Blemishes and Defects', by Henry
H. Breen. On the title-page of this book Clemens had written:

HARTFORD, 1876. Use with care, for it is a scarce book. England
had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh
falsely.

He once wrote a paper for