an papers were curiously
conservative in their reports. Clemens wrote an article on the subject
but concluded not to print it. A paragraph will convey its tenor.

What I am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of
the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that
is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should
be if the stage were in China. We sit "in front," & the audience is
in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear
only an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into
history as the disaster without a history.

He closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says
"gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there."

For in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing
seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick
people in it, and with them four dead ones.

CLXXXII. THE VILLA VIVIANI. 'The American Claimant', published in May
l (1892), did not bring a very satisfactory return. For one thing, the
book-trade was light, and then the Claimant was not up to his usual
standard. It had been written under hard circumstances and by a pen
long out of practice; it had not paid, and its author must work all
the harder on the new undertakings. The conditions at Nauheim seemed
favorable, and they lingered there until well into September. To Mrs.
Crane, who had returned to America, Clemens wrote on the 18th, from
Lucerne, in the midst of their travel to Italy:

We remained in Nauheim a little too long. If we had left four or
five days earlier we should have made Florence in three days. Hard
trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every 7
minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. It took us
3 1/2 hours to get there instead of the regulation 2 hours. We
shall pull through to Milan to-morrow if possible. Next day we
shall start at 10 AM and try to make Bologna, 5 hours. Next day,
Florence, D. V. Next year we will walk. Phelps came to Frankfort
and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the Masons,
supper at our inn--Livy not in it. She was merely allowed a
glimpse, no more. Of course Phelps said she was merely pretending
to be ill; was never looking so well & fine.

A Paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of
its