d made an easy and pleasant outing for him. He says:

"I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They
lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion
of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall
that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving
and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their
avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at
New-Year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held
them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night
when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall,
which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge after
transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they
decided to settle provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the
talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we
jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth."

Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year
and went over in October to receive their degrees. It was Mark Twain's
second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American
institution of learning could confer.

Twichell wrote:

I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention
the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it
will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom
do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you
have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are
identified to the public mind. They grant, of course, your right to hold
and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em;
but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that
whatever. Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely
their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as I
say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality.

Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with
Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home.

I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping
away from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I have been thinking we
might help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary. What are
your plans for getting left, or shall you trus