his talk I would come
away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those
locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of
summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York
together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing
a syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're there." Then, with
our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could
not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
again. Or at times he would reason high--

"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,"

walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.

He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for
it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and
tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It
was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the
implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She
was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but
he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her
goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so
had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless
creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or
hers; she was always s