gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore like an
angel."

In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
billiards. "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace. "He loved the game,
and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and
then the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his
more youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently,
slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."

Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in his
appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among the
clubs of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever
found its way into published literature." It is rumored to have been
called "Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."

In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W. Fisher to accompany him on an exploration
of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned
that Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secret
treasure chests for the famous visitor. One of these guarded treasures
was a volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to
Frederick the Great. "Too much is enough," Mark is reported to have
said, when Fisher translated some of the verses, "I would blush to
remember any of these stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them
when I get to Vienna." When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him
Mark put it into his pocket, saying, "Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is so
busy mispronouncing German these days she can't even attempt to get at
this."

In his letters, too, Howells observed, "He had the Southwestern, the
Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one
ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was
often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he
had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear
to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that
in it he was Shakespearean."

"With a nigger squat on her safety-valve"
John