t she had
enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his.
Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of
nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond
all counting.

She had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. One
day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had
stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed,
timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from
her orthodox views. She had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox
Bible God, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul.
The hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she
had listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the
life away from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this
change. Her God had become a larger God; the greater mind which exerts
its care of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and
environment--the Supreme Good which comprehends the individual flower,
dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of
life and love. Her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown
with the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a
path of her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. It was a sweet
day there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the
memory of both so long as life lasted. Certainly it was the larger
faith; though the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer,
more humanly protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. Long
afterward, in the years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement,
Clemens once said to his wife, "Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the
Christian faith do so," and she answered, "I can't, Youth. I haven't
any."

And the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a
compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then,
all his days.

CXXIII. THE GRANT SPEECH OF 1879

If the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may
find it in the two speeches which Mark Twain made in November and
December of that year. The first of these was delivered at Chicago,
on the occasion of the reception of General Grant by the Army of the
Tennessee, on the evening of November 73, 1879. Grant had just returned
from his splendid tour of the world. His progress from San Fra