the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have
been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they
were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them;
nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by
reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it
myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the
form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But
perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.




XVI.

Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together
without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We
were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor
Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously
impersonal interest, "Oh, see that woman getting into the water!" This
would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than
ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and
back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door,
and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately
getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.