hor
and sage--a suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him.

It lacked soul--comfort that would reach the heart. He added presently a
great Aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different
moods. Sometimes he played it himself, though oftener his secretary
played to him. He went out little that winter--seeing only a few old and
intimate friends. His writing, such as it was, was of a serious nature,
protests against oppression and injustice in a variety of forms. Once he
wrote a "War Prayer," supposed to have been made by a mysterious,
white-robed stranger who enters a church during those ceremonies that
precede the marching of the nation's armies to battle. The minister had
prayed for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a petition
that the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by shells,
its people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land
in rags and hunger. It was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy,
indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled. He did not print it,
because then it would have been regarded as sacrilege.

When summer came again, in a beautiful house at Dublin, New Hampshire, on
the Monadnock slope, he seemed to get back into the old swing of work,
and wrote that pathetic story, "A Horse's Tale." Also "Eve's Diary,"
which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly
fantastic tale entitled "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a
satire in which Gulliver is outdone. He never finished it. He never
could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere,
and the tale was lost. Yet he always meant to get at it again some day
and make order out of chaos.

Old friends were dying, and Mark Twain grew more and more lonely. "My
section of the procession has but a little way to go," he wrote when the
great English actor Henry Irving died. Charles Henry Webb, his first
publisher, John Hay, Bret Harte, Thomas B. Reed, and, indeed, most of his
earlier associates were gone. When an invitation came from San Francisco
to attend a California reunion he replied that his wandering days were
over and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his
life. And in another letter:

"I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old
residents. Since I left there, it has increased in population fully
300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it w