a phrase often
on his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of
color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the
Great Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations
throughout all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion
of pessimism, but only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for
preservation:

From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong &
misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human
blessedness.

No "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions
by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures.

CCLXIV. CITIZEN AND FARMER

The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily.
Clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the
dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these
matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone.

Members of the Harper Company came up with their wives; "angel-fish"
swam in and out of the aquarium; Bermuda friends came to see the new
home; Robert Collier, the publisher, and his wife--"Mrs. Sally," as
Clemens liked to call her--paid their visits; Lord Northcliffe, who was
visiting America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed
with the architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a
country-place he was about to build in Newfoundland. Helen Keller, with
Mr. and Mrs. Macy, came up for a week-end visit. Mrs. Crane came over
from Elmira; and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his
childhood, little Laura Hawkins--Laura Frazer now, widowed and in the
seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up.

That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather
from a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October:

I've grown young in these months of dissipation here. And I have
left off drinking--it isn't necessary now. Society & theology are
sufficient for me.

To Helen Allen, a Bermuda "Angel-Fish," he wrote:

We have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop.
The moment I saw the house I was glad I built it, & now I am gladder
& gladder all the time. I was not dreaming of living here except in
the summer-time--that was before I saw this region & the house, you
see--but that is all changed now; I shall stay here winter & summer
both & not go back to New