orm and face of either friend or enemy. If I
should make a list, now, of persons whom I know in America and
abroad--say to the number of even an entire thousand--it is quite
unlikely that I could reproduce five of them in my mind's eye. Of my
dearest and most intimate friends, I could name eight whom I have seen
and talked with four days ago, but when I try to call them before me
they are formless shadows. Jean has been absent, this past eight or ten
days, in the country, and I wish I could reproduce her in the mirror of
my mind, but I can't do it.

It may be that this defect is not constitutional, but a result of
lifelong absence of mind and indolent and inadequate observation. Once
or twice in my life it has been an embarrassment to me. Twenty years
ago, in the days of Susy's Biography of Me, there was a dispute one
morning at the breakfast-table about the color of a neighbor's eyes. I
was asked for a verdict, but had to confess that if that valued neighbor
and old friend had eyes I was not sure that I had ever seen them. It was
then mockingly suggested that perhaps I didn't even know the color of
the eyes of my own family, and I was required to shut my own at once and
testify. I was able to name the color of Mrs. Clemens's eyes, but was
not able to even suggest a color for Jean's, or Clara's, or Susy's.

All this talk is suggested by Susy's remark: "The other evening as papa
and I were promenading up and down the library." Down to the bottom of
my heart I am thankful that I can see _that_ picture! And it is not dim,
but stands out clear in the unfaded light of twenty-one years ago. In
those days Susy and I used to "promonade" daily up and down the
library, with our arms about each other's waists, and deal in intimate
communion concerning affairs of State, or the deep questions of human
life, or our small personal affairs.

It was quite natural that I should think I had written myself out when I
was only fifty years old, for everybody who has ever written has been
smitten with that superstition at about that age. Not even yet have I
really written myself out. I have merely stopped writing because
dictating is pleasanter work, and because dictating has given me a
strong aversion to the pen, and because two hours of talking per day is
enough, and because--But I am only damaging my mind with this digging
around in it for pretexts where no pretext is needed, and where the
simple truth is for this one time better than an