ve that opportunity to propose. My uncle should have done as he was
asked, without explaining anything to me; but instead, he read me the
letter; and then, of course, I could not go--and did not. He (Barrett)
left the country presently, and I, to stop the clacking tongues, and to
show him that I did not care, married, in a pet. In all these sixty-four
years I have not seen him since. I saw in a paper that he was going to
attend that Old Settlers' Convention. Only three hours before we reached
that hotel, he had been standing there!"

Since then, her memory is wholly faded out and gone; and now she writes
letters to the school-mates who had been dead forty years, and wonders
why they neglect her and do not answer.

Think of her carrying that pathetic burden in her old heart sixty-four
years, and no human being ever suspecting it!

Yrs ever,

MARK.

We do not get the idea from this letter that those two long
ago sweethearts quarreled, but Mark Twain once spoke of
their having done so, and there may have been a
disagreement, assuming that there was a subsequent meeting.
It does not matter, now. In speaking of it, Mark Twain once
said: "It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed
the field of my personal experience in a long lifetime."--
[When Mark Twain: A Biography was written this letter had
not come to light, and the matter was stated there in
accordance with Mark Twain's latest memory of it.]

Howells wrote: "After all, how poor and hackneyed all the
inventions are compared with the simple and stately facts.
Who could have imagined such a heart-break as that? Yet it
went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no
more noise than a grave under foot. I doubt if fiction will
ever get the knack of such things."

Jane Clemens now lived with her son Orion and his wife, in
Keokuk, where she was more contented than elsewhere. In
these later days her memory had become erratic, her
realization of events about her uncertain, but there were
times when she was quite her former self, remembering
clearly and talking with her old-time gaiety of spirit.
Mark Twain frequently sent her playful letters to amuse her,
letters full of such boyish gaiety as had amused her long
years before. The one that follows is a