lapse. Great
alarm. Subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her.

And to MacAlister toward the end of March:

We are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring
effects for Mrs. Clemens.

But a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain
through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. "But
it will not last," he said.

The invalid improved then, and there was a concert in Florence at which
Clara Clemens sang. Clemens in his note-book says:

April 8. Clara's concert was a triumph. Livy woke up & sent for
her to tell her all about it, near midnight.

But a day or two later she was worse again--then better. The hearts
in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and
despair.

One familiar with the Clemens history might well have been filled with
forebodings. Already in January a member of the family, Mollie Clemens,
Orion's wife, died, news which was kept from Mrs. Clemens, as was the
death of Aldrich's son, and that of Sir Henry M. Stanley, both of which
occurred that spring.

Indeed, death harvested freely that year among the Clemens friendships.
Clemens wrote Twichell:

Yours has just this moment arrived-just as I was finishing a note to
poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid
in England was to Stanley's. Lord! how my friends & acquaintances
fall about me now in my gray-headed days! Vereshchagin, Mommsen,
Dvorak, Lenbach, & Jokai, all so recently, & now Stanley. I have
known Stanley 37 years. Goodness, who is there I haven't known?

CCXXXI. THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

In one of his notes near the end of April Clemens writes that once more,
as at Riverdale, he has been excluded from Mrs. Clemens's room except
for the briefest moment at a time. But on May 12th, to R. W. Gilder, he
reported:

For two days now we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens
(unberufen). After 20 months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery
she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks
bright & young & pretty. She remains what she always was, the most
wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and
recuperative power that ever was. But ah, dear! it won't last;
this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall
go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit!

May 13, A.M. I have just paid one of