ded as ideal. That is Twichell's
opinion and Howells's. The latter sums up:

Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
most perfect.

XCVII. THE WALK TO BOSTON

The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
wrote:

The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
with autumn leaves.

And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.

Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage. We
have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and most
marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....

There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
his shoulders.

The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
the grounds discussing the house.

Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada
habit of pedestrian wandering. Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about
five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points;
and often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so
absorbed in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance
slipped away almost unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those
long walks! They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and
all the range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases
of literature and history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they
were, illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now