He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was
much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western
city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated
me on having gone into "the lecture field," and then he said: "I know
where you are now. You are in hell."

It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that
round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him
by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not
purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half
of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author
who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to
the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader's
eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who
has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on
the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he
did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing
nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of
interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he
faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the
debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they