snowflakes--anything white. Out they'd fly.... Oh! he'd swear at
anything when he was on a rampage. He'd swear at his razor if it didn't
cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I'd go and
knock; I'd say, 'Mrs. Clemens wants to know what's the matter.' And
then he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me
Katy?' 'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.' Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he
was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs.
Clemens hated swearing." But his swearing never seemed really bad to
Katy Leary, "It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said.
"Sort of amusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore
like an angel."

In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
billiards. "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace. "He loved the game,
and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then
the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more
youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently,
slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."

Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in his
appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found
its way into published literature." It is rumored to have been called
"Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."