The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. Their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought—echo-mind answering to mind—without the employment of words. Clemens records in his notes:
Sunday A.M., August 11th. Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon,
last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage
which has thus far hit me with force—Tito compromising with his
conscience, and resolving to do, not a bad thing, but not the best
thing. Joe entered the room five minutes—no, three minutes later
—and without prelude said, “I read that book you've got there six
years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the
passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and
resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing.” This is
Joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty-
four hours ago. So my mind operated on his in this instance. He
said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I
have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't
know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came
and that particular passage. Now I, forty feet away, in another
room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment.
Couldn't suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book
had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112,
Tauchnitz edition.
And again:
The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. This
evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the
Matterhorn. Then Joe said, “We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and
inquire for Livy's telegram.” If he had been but one instant later
I should have said those words instead of him.
Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson. They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time. The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, “And there's the man!” Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling.
Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents. Clemens held that there was no such thing as an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. Once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. The condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's primal atom.
The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making “Harris” (Twichell) set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one of those logs. But that is literature. Twichell, in a letter home, has preserved a likelier and lovelier story:
Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing that he so delights in as
a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when
once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in
stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. Tonight, as we were
on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by
the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in.
When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as
hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the
wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to
view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said
afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted
just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in
certain directions.
Then generalizing, Twichell adds:
He has coarse spots in him. But I never knew a person so finely
regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. He hates to pass
another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take
off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. And he is exceedingly
timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask
a question. His sensitive regard for others extends to animals.
When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can't
bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day,
when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a
little, Mark said, “The fellow's got the notion that we are in a
hurry.” He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of
everything—or most things.