orm for years. He had ordered his
carriage for 9. The coachman sent in for him at 9, but he said, "Oh,
nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these? Tell him to go away &
come in an hour!"

At 10 he was called for again, & Mrs. Fields, getting uneasy, rose, but
he wouldn't go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever. Twice more Mrs.
Fields rose, but he wouldn't go--& he didn't go till half past 10--an
unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days. He was prodigiously
complimentary about some of my books, & is having Pudd'nhead read to
him. I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked
it all through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the
loveletters, & it pleased him.

One other address Clemens delivered that winter, at Fair Haven, on
the opening of the Millicent Library, a present to the town from Mrs.
Rogers. Mrs. Rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps Mr.
Clemens would be willing to say a few words there. Mr. Rogers had
replied, "Oh, Clemens is in trouble. I don't like to ask him," but a day
or two later told him of Mrs. Rogers's wish, adding:

"Don't feel at all that you need to do it. I know just how you are
feeling, how worried you are."

Clemens answered, "Mr. Rogers, do you think there is anything I could do
for you that I wouldn't do?"

It was on this occasion that he told for the first time the "stolen
watermelon" story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a
watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to
the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its
place.

In spite of his cares and diversions Clemens's literary activities
of this time were considerable. He wrote an article for the Youth's
Companion--"How to Tell a Story"--and another for the North American
Review on Fenimore Cooper's "Literary Offenses." Mark Twain had not
much respect for Cooper as a literary artist. Cooper's stilted
artificialities and slipshod English exasperated him and made it
hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the
Deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. Clemens had also promised some
stories to Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his
Christmas number, "Traveling with a Reformer," which had grown out
of some incidents of that long-ago journey with Osgood to Chicago,
supplemented by others that had happened on the more recent visit to
that city with Hall. This story had already appear