sorrow of Susy's death had hastened her own end. How
darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had been
making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy.

But such moods were evanescent. He was oftener gay than somber. One
morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how
he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. An
artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most
amusing thing in the world. But he had not been satisfied with it, and
had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what he
considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when
he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence had
followed.

"A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine," he
said, "and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed
an hour and a half. Then a lady said, with evident feeling, 'Lord, how
pathetic!' For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains of my great
deeps were broken up, and I rained laughter for forty days and forty
nights during as much as three minutes. By that time I realized it was
my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to deceive them with
elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the humorous explosion at
the end; but I had constructed such a fog of pathos that when I got to
the humor you couldn't find it."

He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps
he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes
he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline
some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested.

Once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the
Back Number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from
history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said never
lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself to
propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be its
publisher and I its editor. I think I assented, and the dictation
proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently.

He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the
bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom
could find the one most needed. Once, after a feverishly impatient
search for a few moments, he invited Miss Hobby