knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful &
pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened,
three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh
in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings.

Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that
within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home. In
his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote:

Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her
mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed.
As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature.

Three days later he added:

It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103
& 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks
like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story
in the Christmas Harper's "Was it Heaven? or Hell?"--has been
enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied
about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having
outdoors in the winter sports.

That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden of
it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs.
Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not
even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest
interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and
daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In an
account which Clemens once set down of the "Siege and Season of
Unveracity," as he called it, he said:

Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a
hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen
dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and
happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in
her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a
truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara's
reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's
mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never
doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities
without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a
small and simple one the case would have been different. I was
never able t