and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these.
It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether
now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means
of knowing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be
published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be
minimized for all the survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working
at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely
dropped it; I never asked.

We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth
Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we
did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would
not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends,
and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was
going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of
joking reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us
very frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to
have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few
streets above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather
more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the
Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian
sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived through the episode of
Kossuth's visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the
Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than
now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the "oppressed of Europe"; the
oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not
count. I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of
freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of
his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars,
and I think now I set the figure too high. I had already refused to sign