After luncheon he became a Democrat and agreed to write a score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which the Democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. He wrote these shouting Democratic mottoes during the afternoon, and they occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing Republican campaign speech in the open air while his Democratic transparencies passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present.

He was a most strange creature—but in spite of his eccentricities he was beloved, all his life, in whatsoever community he lived. And he was also held in high esteem, for at bottom he was a sterling man.

Whenever he had a chance to get into a ridiculous position he was generally competent for that occasion. When he and his wife were living in Hartford, at the time when he was on the staff of the Evening Post, they were boarders and lodgers in a house that was pretty well stocked with nice men and women of moderate means. There was a bath-room that was common to the tribe, and one Sunday afternoon when the rest of the house was steeped in restful repose, Orion thought he would take a bath, and he carried that idea to a more or less successful issue. But he didn’t lock the door. It was his custom, in summer weather, to fill the long bath-tub nearly full of cold water and then get in it on his knees with his nose on the bottom and maintain this pleasant attitude a couple of minutes at a time. A chambermaid came in there, and then she rushed out and went shrieking through the house,

“Mr. Clemens is drowned!”

Everybody came flying out of the doors, and Mrs. Clemens rushed by, crying out in agony,

“How do you know it is Mr. Clemens?”

And the chambermaid said, “I don’t.”

It reminds me of Bill Nye, poor fellow,—that real humorist, that gentle good soul. Well, he is dead. Peace to his ashes. He was the baldest human being I ever saw. His whole skull was brilliantly shining. It was like a dome with the sun flashing upon it. He had hardly even a fringe of hair. Once somebody admitted astonishment at his extraordinary baldness.

“Oh” he said “it is nothing. You ought to see my brother. One day he fell overboard from a ferry-boat and when he came up a woman’s voice broke high over the tumult of frightened and anxious exclamations and said, ‘You shameless thing! And ladies present! Go down and come up the other way.’”

About twenty-five years ago—along there somewhere—I suggested to Orion that he write an autobiography. I asked him to try to tell the straight truth in it; to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively, and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them. I said that this had never been done, and that if he could do it his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature. I said I was offering him a job which I could not duplicate in my own case, but I would cherish the hope that he might succeed with it. I recognize now that I was trying to saddle upon him an impossibility. I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.

Orion wrote his autobiography and sent it to me. But great was my disappointment; and my vexation, too. In it he was constantly making a hero of himself, exactly as I should have done and am doing now, and he was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an unheroic light. I knew several incidents of his life which were distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when I came across them in his autobiography they had changed color. They had turned themselves inside out, and were things to be intemperately proud of. In my dissatisfaction I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography.