Those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair. By daylight Clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and nights he plunged into social activities—dinners, amusements, suppers, balls, and the like. He was besieged with invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; “Jamie” Dodge conferred upon him the appropriate title: of “The Belle of New York.” In his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. He attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having shifted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. Henry Rogers had taken his load upon him.

“It rests me,” Rogers said, “to experiment with the affairs of a friend when I am tired of my own. You enjoy yourself. Let me work at the puzzle a little.”

And Clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit at such times. To Mrs. Clemens (in Paris now, at the Hotel Brighton) he wrote:

He adds that a friend has just offered to Webster & Co. a book that arraigns the Standard Oil magnates individual by individual.

He tells how he played billiards with Rogers, tirelessly as always, until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked:

“Don't you ever get tired?”

And he answered:

“I don't know what it is to get tired. I wish I did.”

He wrote of going with Mr. Rogers to the Madison Square Garden to see an exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, James J. Corbett. Dr. Rice accompanied him, and painters Robert Reid and Edward Simmons, from The Players. They had five seats in a box, and Stanford White came along presently and took Clemens into the champion's dressing-room.

Just before Christmas a member named Scott said one day:

“Mr. Clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom. I've got to attend my uncle's funeral and it's raining very hard. I'd like to wear it.”

The coat was an old one, in the pockets of which Clemens kept a melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters, and what not.

“Scott,” he said, “if you won't lose anything out of the pockets of that coat you may wear it.”

An hour or two later Clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a package for him was in the office. He called for it and found a neat bundle, which somehow had a Christmas look. He carried it up to the reading-room with a showy, air.

“Now, boys,” he said, “you may make all the fun of Christmas you like, but it's pretty nice, after all, to be remembered.”

They gathered around and he undid the package. It was filled with the pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat. Scott had taken special precautions against losing them.

Mark Twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled:

“Well—, d—-n Scott. I hope his uncle's funeral will be a failure!”

The second anecdote concerns The Player egg-cups. They easily hold two eggs, but not three. One morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast order. Clemens said:

“Boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me.”

By and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. Clemens looked at the egg portion and asked:

“Boy, what was my order?”

“Three soft eggs broken in the cup, Mr. Clemens.”

“And you've filled that order, have you?”

“Yes, Mr. Clemens.”

“Boy, you are trifling with the truth; I've been trying all winter to get three eggs into that cup.”]

In one letter he tells of a dinner with his old Comstock friend, John Mackay—a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in prosperous moments, thirty years before.

“The guests were old gray Pacific coasters,” he said, “whom I knew when they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when we went gipsying—a long time ago—thirty years.”

In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at Robert Reid's studio. There were present, he says:

In his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty.

He refers to Susy's recent illness and to Mrs. Clemens's own poor state of health.

He realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he wrote:

Sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope. Mrs. Clemens, writing to her sister in January, said:

It appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days. She added:

Mr. Rogers had agreed that he would bring Paige to rational terms, and with Clemens made a trip to Chicago. All agreed now that the machine promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody could be concluded—Paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and dicker as to terms. Finally a telegram came from Chicago saying that Paige had agreed to terms. On that day Clemens wrote in his note-book:

This is a great date in my history. Yesterday we were paupers with but 3 months' rations of cash left and $160,000 in debt, my wife & I, but this telegram makes us wealthy.

But it was not until a fortnight later that Paige did actually sign. This was on the 1st of February, '94, and Clemens that night cabled to Paris, so that Mrs. Clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the morning of their anniversary:

“Wedding news. Our ship is safe in port. I sail the moment Rogers can spare me.”

So this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance again—the grand hope. He was as concerned with it as if it had been an actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps—that shadow, that farce, that nightmare. One longs to go back through the years and face him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all.