ried to express the charm of that household.
None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though
these were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the
atmosphere; and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only
see and feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with
his subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence,
as it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.

As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house
was unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the
kitchen toward the street, and he said:

"So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the
front yard."

But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house
extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful.
It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced
at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn,
the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to
the dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little
conservatory, semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Says Howells:

The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There,
while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
delicate accents of its varied blossoms.

In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the
top of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, "The ornament of a
house is the friends that frequent it," surely never more appropriately
inscribed.

There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. There
was a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in
winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling
snow. The library windows looked out over the valley with the little
stream in it, and through