hatting about the resorters, one day,
and in the course of their talk this remark was dropped:

"I was a-drivin' a passel of 'em round about yisterday evenin', quiet
ones, you know, still and solemn, and all to wunst they busted out to
make your hair lift and I judged hell was to pay. Now what do you reckon
it was? It wa'n't anything but jest one of them common damned yaller
sunsets."

In those days--

[_Tuesday, October 16, 1906._] ... Warner is gone. Stockton is gone. I
attended both funerals. Warner was a near neighbor, from the autumn of
'71 until his death, nineteen years afterward. It is not the privilege
of the most of us to have many intimate friends--a dozen is our
aggregate--but I think he could count his by the score. It is seldom
that a man is so beloved by both sexes and all ages as Warner was. There
was a charm about his spirit, and his ways, and his words, that won all
that came within the sphere of its influence. Our children adopted him
while they were little creatures, and thenceforth, to the end, he was
"Cousin Charley" to them. He was "Uncle Charley" to the children of more
than one other friend. Mrs. Clemens was very fond of him, and he always
called her by her first name--shortened. Warner died, as she died, and
as I would die--without premonition, without a moment's warning.

Uncle Remus still lives, and must be over a thousand years old. Indeed,
I know that this must be so, because I have seen a new photograph of him
in the public prints within the last month or so, and in that picture
his aspects are distinctly and strikingly geological, and one can see he
is thinking about the mastodons and plesiosaurians that he used to play
with when he was young.

It is just a quarter of a century since I have seen Uncle Remus. He
visited us in our home in Hartford and was reverently devoured by the
big eyes of Susy and Clara, for I made a deep and awful impression upon
the little creatures--who knew his book by heart through my nightly
declamation of its tales to them--by revealing to them privately that he
was the real Uncle Remus whitewashed so that he could come into people's
houses the front way.

He was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met. When there were
people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were
gone. But he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity
of the immortal Remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and
sincerities of his character s