Back from an around-the-world speaking tour, Samuel Clemens was in England, standing in his dining room, thinking of nothing in particular, when he was handed a cablegram. It read:

"Susy [his 24-year-old daughter, still in America] was peacefully released to-day."

Almost 10 years later, he still marveled:

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the

words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss - that is all. It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential - there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. ...

From "The Autobiography of Mark Twain"