a was to continue in some degree for many a long month.
All that winter and spring Mrs. Clemens kept but a frail hold on life.
Clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could. He
spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when
he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he
confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages
which he was allowed to push under her door. He was always waiting there
long before the moment he was permitted to enter. Her illness and her
helplessness made manifest what Howells has fittingly characterized as
his "beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving
quality of his most faithful soul."

CCXXVII

THE SECOND RIVERDALE WINTER

Most of Mark Twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another,
and with more or less success. He had two plays going that winter, one
of them the little "Death Disk," which--in story form had appeared a year
before in Harper's Magazine. It was put on at the Carnegie Lyceum with
considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a
long continuance.

Another play of that year was a dramatization of Huckleberry Finn, by Lee
Arthur. This was played with a good deal of success in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to
twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and
locality. Why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent;
certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse.

Huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in
being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of Denver
and Omaha. It was years since Huck had been in trouble of that sort, and
he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence.

Certain entries in Mark Twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and
thought at this period. We find such entries as this:

Saturday, January 3, 1903. The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity,
ostentation, arrogance, tyranny.

Sunday, January 4, 1903. The offspring of poverty: Greed,
sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking,
cheating, stealing, murder.

Monday, February 2, 1903. 33d wedding anniversary. I was allowed
to see Livy 5 minutes this morning in honor of the day. She makes
but little progress toward recovery, still there