believe he did not read
it any more in later years. In the days I knew him he read steadily
not much besides Suetonius and Pepys and Carlyle. These and his simple
astronomies and geologies and the Morte Arthure and the poems of Kipling
were seldom far from his hand.

CCLXXXVIII. A BERMUDA BIRTHDAY

It was the middle of November, 1909, when Clemens decided to take
another Bermuda vacation, and it was the 19th that we sailed. I went
to New York a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the
18th received the news that Richard Watson Gilder had suddenly died.

Next morning there was other news. Clemens's old friend, William M.
Laffan, of the Sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. I
met Clemens at the train. He had already heard about Gilder; but he had
not yet learned of Laffan's death. He said:

"That's just it. Gilder and Laffan get all the good things that come
along and I never get anything."

Then, suddenly remembering, he added:

"How curious it is! I have been thinking of Laffan coming down on
the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this Stetson-Eddy
affair."

I asked when he had begun thinking of Laffan.

He said: "Within the hour."

It was within the hour that I had received the news, and naturally in
my mind had carried it instantly to him. Perhaps there was something
telepathic in it.

He was not at all ill going down to Bermuda, which was a fortunate
thing, for the water was rough and I was quite disqualified. We did
not even discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important
news--the reported discovery of a new planet.

But there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in
the Hamilton Hotel. It was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked
out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying
and bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance
that the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still
a satellite. The report had said that it was probably four hundred
billions of miles distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar
system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow
candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it
could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace,
yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that
heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had be