thor who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and
patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied:

DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and
patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me
nine editions. Send them by express.

Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

The collapse of the "great hope" meant to the Clemens household that
their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to
become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a
(1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister:

As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr.
Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me,
saying: "It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present."

It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that
twenty-five years had brought.

Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly.
The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He
was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation,
and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a
reality.

As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The story
was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr;
the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would say, "Wait,
wait till I get a handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had
been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for
devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan of Arc
was burned at the stake," meaning that the book was finished.

Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been
that she desired to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show
the true literary touch. Her father, in an unpublished article which he
once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to
take its place at the end of a story:

And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. It is
always so. Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human
life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. Poor human life! It may
not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and
greater consummations.

She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant,
flowing, scintillating spee