armside and blue hills. He
said, very gently:

"How beautiful it all is? I did not think it could be as beautiful as
this."

He was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of
the hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only
color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing
billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight.
Then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation
of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening
hills. When he had seen it all--the natural Italian garden below the
terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a
rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in
the billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final
verdict:

"It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail.
It might have been here always."

He was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home,
for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw
in his adaptation. To see him over the billiard-table, five minutes
later, one could easily fancy that Mark Twain, as well as the house, had
"been there always." Only the presence of his daughters was needed now
to complete his satisfaction in everything.

There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so
perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would
scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely
room. A little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar,
neighbors, inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located near by, set
off some fireworks. Clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets
climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival.

"I wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me," he said, softly.
"I never go to any trouble for anybody"--a statement which all who heard
it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny.

That first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant
billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in
the rack, there was none to say that Mark Twain's first day in his new
home had not been a happy one.

CCLXIX. FIRST DAYS AT STORMFIELD

I went up next afternoon, for I knew how he dreaded loneliness. We
played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following t