usand years
old. Why, I listened to your stories while I was being rocked in the
cradle." Trowbridge said:

"Mark, there's some mistake. My earliest infant smile was wakened with
one of your jokes."

They stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were
photographed--an interesting picture.

We returned to Boston that evening. Clemens did not wish to hurry in
the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and
driving around and around Commonwealth Avenue in a victoria in the cool
of the evening. Once, remembering Aldrich, he said:

"I was just planning Tom Sawyer when he was beginning the 'Story of a
Bad Boy'. When I heard that he was writing that I thought of giving up
mine, but Aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. He
thought my Missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of
New England, and of course he was right."

He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. He
said:

"Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which
we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular
point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual
island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of
intellect we call a group, or school, and name it.

"Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group. Now there's been still
another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable. It
will soon be gone. I suppose they will have to name it by and by."

He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited
in other days. The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other
and more distinguished sights. Clemens mildly but firmly refused any
variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around
the shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to
twinkle among the trees.

CCLXXI. DEATH OF "SAM" MOFFETT

Clemens' next absence from Redding came on August 1, 1908, when the
sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew,
Samuel E. Moffett, in the surf of the Jersey shore. Moffett was his
nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. He was
superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and
large-hearted, and of noble ideals. With much of the same sense of humor
which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal
faculty of acquiring and retainin