ned the story,
"Was it Heaven? or Hell?" and it immediately brought a flood of letters
to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. An
Englishman wrote: "I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so
profoundly true a story"; and an American declared it to be the best
short story ever written. Another letter said:

I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them
--then put them beside Dante's Beatrice in Paradise.

There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different
sort. It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through
almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. His dead daughter
had even borne the same name--Helen. She had died of typhus while her
mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been
maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written
letters. Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking
nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented
the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy.

I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by
one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful &
pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened,
three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh
in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings.

Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that
within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home.
In his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote:

Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her
mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed.
As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature.

Three days later he added:

It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103
& 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks
like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story
in the Christmas Harper's "Was it Heaven? or Hell?"--has been
enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied
about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having
outdoors in the winter sports.

That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden
of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entire