NOTEBOOK

loop, then when we come back to the house I
shall be on the side next the step." "Xo," said
Whitmore, "it won't make any difference which
way we go around the loop, the result will be
the same—you will be on the outside, "Try it,"
said Clemens, and Whitmore did so, with the
result as he had prophesied. Clemens, however,
was still unconvinced and made him try it again,
going around the loop first one way and then the
other, insisting that there must be a difference in
the result. He confessed his mistake at last, but
all his life it troubled him, and in almost every
one of his notebooks there is a diagram of the
loop and an attempt to show that his first con-
clusion was correct.

June 29 (on a trip back to America). Lake Shore and
Michigan Southern and N. Y. Central. Today a man
timed the train and said we were making 65 miles an
hour. The porter said we sometimes make 70, and that
over a distance of 400 miles we average 62. Over there
the fastest train goes from Frankfort to Xauheim in forty
minutes—25 miles. It takes the express nine hours to go
from Berlin to Frankfort. Slow.

He was back in the typesetter tangle again
and the entanglement of his business affairs. His
life could have been so simple, so unharrassed,
but for these things.

Union League Club, noon. I breakfasted here yesterday
about ten. Sat around till 2 P.M. should say. Loafed down
to Glenhem Hotel and in my room enjoyed the prodigious
downpour of rain awhile; then went to bed—three or four
P.M., and was soon absorbed in The Little Minister with
shutters closed and gas lit. Hours and hours afterwards—

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