hen he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his
own home for the first time in seventeen years. It was an anxious
moment, and no one spoke immediately. But presently his eye had taken in
the satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide
doors that led to the dining-room--on through the open French windows to
an enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills. He
said, very gently:

"How beautiful it all is? I did not think it could be as beautiful as
this."

He was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of the
hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only
color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing
billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight. Then
to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation of
color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening
hills. When he had seen it all--the natural Italian garden below the
terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a
rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in the
billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final
verdict:

"It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail. It
might have been here always."

He was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home,
for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw in
his adaptation. To see him over the billiard-table, five minutes later,
one could easily fancy that Mark Twain, as well as the house, had "been
there always." Only the presence of his daughters was needed now to
complete his satisfaction in everything.

There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so
perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would
scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely
room. A little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar,
neighbors, inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located near by, set
off some fireworks. Clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets
climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival.

"I wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me," he said, softly. "I
never go to any trouble for anybody"--a statement which all who heard it,
and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny.

That first evenin