Once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of
telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might
carry comfort.--["Clemens had then and for many years the habit of
writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was
experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily
routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest
fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or
forty pages:" (My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells.)] Whatever of
picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for
Howells's entertainment. Some of these domestic incidents carry the
flavor of his best humor. Once he wrote:
Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't
take the cat down to the cellar; Rosa says he has left it shut up in
the conservatory." So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat).
About three in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, "I do believe
I hear that cat in the drawing-room. What did you do with him?" I
answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the
right thing for once, and said, "I opened the conservatory doors,
took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that
there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar." Language
wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. But the sense of
what she said was, "He couldn't have done any harm in the
conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him
and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the
drawing-room.
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