to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when
she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.

"I should not have been permitted to do it," he said, remembering. "I was
not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have
gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose
myself dreaming. After a while the coachman looked around and noticed
that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little fellow, and that
he was exposed to the chilly air. He called my attention to it, but it
was too late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and he did not
get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There it was pronounced
diphtheria, and of course he died."

So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.

The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. It
seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of her letters she
says:

"I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves," and she
expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her
sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.

They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
charge of the house at Hartford.

Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,
but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and
sold as the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book."

He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had grown out of the
inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of
scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the
gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge
or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. He states that he
intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of
whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,
and have it manufactured for the trade.

About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.
Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken i