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Reminiscences of the Beecher family—Miss Clara Clemens singing in North Attleboro,te Massachusettste, a place noted for manufacture of cheap jewelry—Anecdote of the feather-duster man, told to Mr. Clemens by Professorte Sloane.

Isabella Beecher Hooker is dead. I first made her acquaintance about forty years ago; she and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, were near neighbors of ours in Hartford during eighteen years. I knew all the Beecher brotherhood and sisterhood, I believe. The men were all preachers, and all more or less celebrated in their day. I knew Reverendte Henry Ward, Reverendte Thomas K., Reverendte Charles, and Reverendte James, very well; they all rank as conspicuously able men, but of course none of them was as able, or as internationally famous, as Henry Ward, that first of American pulpit orators. They are all deadan. There was not an ungifted Beecher among all those brothers and sisters, and not one that did not make a considerablete name.

Butte the Beecher talent is all gone now; the last concentration of it went out of the world with Isabella Beecher Hooker. I knew Reverendte Thomas K. Beecher intimately for a good many years. He came from Connecticut to Elmira in his early manhood, when he was a theological fledgling, to take charge of a Congregational church there whose chief financial support was Jervis Langdon, my to-be father-in-law, and he continued in that charge until he died, a few years ago, aged seventy-four. He was deeply versed in the sciences, and his pulpit eloquence fell but little short of that of his great brother, Henry Ward. His was a keen intellect, and he was brilliant in conversation, and always interesting—except when his topic was theology. He had no theology of his own, any more than has any other person; he had an abundance of it, but he got it all at second-hand. He would have been afraid to examine his subject with his own fine mind lest doubts should result, and unsettle him. He was a very frank, straightforward man, and he told me once, in the plainest terms, that when he came on from Connecticut to assume the pastorship of that Elmira church he was a strenuous and decided unbeliever. It astonished me. But he followed it with a statement which astonished me more; he said that with his bringing up he was aware that he could never be happy, or at peace, and free from terrors, until he should become a believer, and that he had accepted that pastorate without any pangs of conscience for the reason that he had made up his mind to compel himself to become a believer, let the cost be what it might. It seemed a strange thing to say, but he said it. He also said that within a twelvemonth or twote he perfectly succeeded in his extraordinary enterprise, and that thenceforth he was as complete and as thorough a believer as any Christian that had ever lived. He was one of the best men I have ever known; also he was one of the best citizens I have ever known. To the end of his days he was looked up to in that town, by both sinner and saint, as a man whose judgment in matters concerning the welfare of the town was better and sounder than

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Isabella Beecher Hooker threw herself into the woman’s rights movement among the earliest, some sixty years ago, and she labored with all her splendid energies in that great cause all the rest of her lifean; as an able and efficient worker she ranks immediately after those great chiefs, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mrs. Livermore. When these powerful sisters entered the field in 1848an woman was what she had always been in all countries and under all religions, all savageries, allte civilizations—a slave, and under contempt. The laws affecting women were a disgrace to our statute bookte. Those brave women besieged the legislatures of the land, year after year, suffering and enduring all manner of reproach, rebuke, scorn and obloquy, yet never surrendering, never sounding a retreat; their wonderful campaign lasted a great many years, and is the most wonderful in history, for it achieved a revolution—the only one achieved in human history for the emancipation of half a nationte that cost not a drop of blood. They broke the chains of their sex and set it free.

Clara is singing in New England. I have a letter from the stage management in North Attleboro,te Massachusettsan, asking me in a matter-of-course way—not to say in a commanding way—teto come up there and introduce her to her audience, gratis, of course. I think that that must be their idea, because they did not ask me for my terms; still that may be only an oversight, so I have sent the terms—five thousand dollars—but I don’t hear from those people, although they have had a good three days in which to jump at my offer. Maybe they don’t want me after all; but I don’t care; I don’t want to go, anyway.te However, the North Attleborote letter has brought that town back to my mind after an interval of twenty or twenty-five years, during which spacious spread of time its name has never happened to drift across the field of my memory, so far as I recollect.te

Away back there at the further verge of that vast interval, I had a talk about North Attleborote one day with Professorte William M. Sloane, then of Princeton, now of Columbia Universityan. He told me that North Attleborote was a place apart: that it was the centrete of a unique industry—an industry not to be found elsewhere in the United States; an industry whose office was to furnish cheap gimcrack jewelry to our nation—jewelry of a flashy and attractive aspect, jewelry built out of fictitious gold and real glass; and sold honestly as imitationry.te He said that the jewelry factories were many and large, and employed hundreds and hundreds of girls and boys and men—in fact the bulk of the community; he said that in the city of New York there was a vast warehouse stocked from roof to cellar with that jewelry, and that from that building this product was forwarded to every State in the Unionan, and in truly surprising quantity. Then he told me this curious tale.

One day he was passing by that New York building and he entered it, out of curiosity, to see what he might see. He found much jewelry on exhibition in show-cases; on the outside of each parcel there was a sample of the parcel’s contents, and also the parcel’s price in figures. It was a villainous March day—muddy, slushy, damp, misty, drippy; and cold and raw. Presently, meek and drooping, entered a sad-faced man of about forty, who seemed

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“You don’t seem surprised. Do you know that tramp? Have you ever seen him before?”

“Oh yes,” said the clerk, “we know him; he is called the Feather-Duster Manante; he is a regular customer of ours.”

“Tell me about him, won’t you?”

But the clerk couldn’t. He said it would be a breach of confidence; that the feather-duster man did not wish to be known.

I cannot now remember by what arts Sloane got hold of the man, a little later, and won his confidence and got his story out of him, but I can well remember the story, as the man told it to Sloane. It was about like this:

The Man’s Story.te

I am not a tramp, but I dress the part for business purposes. I earn a good and sure living in my occupation; I own property, and I have a good balance always in the bank. My business is not followed in exactly my way by any other person in the land; I planned it out myself; I practisedte it upon the people; I revised it, corrected it, improved it, and finally perfected it; and now I never change it, for it needs no change. I sell pinchbeck jewelry, and pinchbeck jewelry alone; I peddle it on foot far and wide, sometimes as far west as Ohio and as far south as the Gulf; at first I used to go out with a good many kinds of jewelry, so as to meet the requirements of all tastes, but gradually I discarded one kind and then another, as experience suggested, until at last my plan was perfect and unimprovable, and my stock was weeded down to just two articles—two, and no more; and since then I have never peddled any but just those two—engagement rings and wedding rings. That market never slacks; people never stop getting engaged, and they never stop getting married. It’s a trade that’s like undertaking—sure and steady, no fluctuations in good times or bad, the demand always the same.

Sloane interrupted to say,

“But aren’t you forgetting about the feather-dusters?”te

No, the man said, that is only a blind. I always carry them with me; I always offer them for sale, but never urgently, for I don’t want anybody to buy; now and then I can’t help it; somebody buys a duster and I have to stand it, but it’s an inconvenience, because

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The feather-duster man’s story continued. He tells how he engraves skewered hearts and initials on wedding rings.

I’vete got a trade—engraving on silversmiths’ work—but it furnished me only a poor living and I gave it up, ten years ago, in order to try commerce, for I felt that I had a talent for commerce. From that day to this I have walked the earth distributing North Attleborote jewelry to the farmers and villagers of our country. You saw me buy twelve dozen very good-lookingte wedding rings for seven dollars—say about five cents apiece; they have good weight, they have dignity, they are handsome, and they have a convincing 24-carat aspect; if they were gold, they would be worth ten dollars apiece, retail. To begin with, I take them home and engrave two sets of initials on the inside of them, with two hearts on a skewer between. Those hearts are very fetching. I have tried other devices, but for business,te out in the country, where sentiment reigns and has its home, they are worth all the rest ofte a person’s viscera put together,te lungs and all; skewered with an arrow, you know; you would thinkte hearts skewered on a fork would be exactly the same thing, but it’s not; the trade would go to hell in a minute. It shows the power of sentiment; it shows what human beings are, out in the country—and I know all about them by this time; I don’t make any mistakes with my customers.

I always engrave the skewered hearts in the wedding rings, and I always put initials on each side of them; any initials will answer; I could use the same ones all the time if I wanted to; you will presently see that it wouldn’t hurt the business any. I do use variety in the matter of initials, but it’s only to rest myself; it isn’t necessary. You notice I bought only twelve dozen this time; it’s because I shan’tte go any distance from New York for a couple of weeks till I’m ready to start South when April comes and the sunshine; I’ll lay in a big stock then, and be gone two months. You didn’t see me buy any engagement rings. It is because I’ve got a bucketful or two at home. When you buy several thousand at a time you get them at a large discount, and it’s worth while. Each engagement ring has a small glass diamond in it, and is a very pretty thing, and captivating to the eye of young persons who are dangling on the brink of matrimony. If the ring was genuine, it would be worth seventy-five dollars; what I can get for it over fifteen cents is profit, and I always suit the price to the emotions of the customer; sometimes his emotions reach fifteen dollars, but if I land him for seven, or eight, or nine, I am satisfied, for where ate young person’s heart is engaged I couldn’t be any way but tender if I tried; it’s the way I am made. I myself have loved, and I know how it feels.

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Sloane broke in with,

“Do you mean to say that there were two hundred and sixty-four married women in so small a community as that that had never been provided with the certification and protection of a wedding ringte?”

I never said that, did I? The statistics look strange to you at present, but they won’t look strange after I have got done explaining.te

The feather-duster man’s story concluded.

You see, the procedure is this: for instance, I am languoring along a village street looking tired, and maybe discouraged; if it’s a little muddy and drizzlyte and dismal, all the better, for then you are most likely to catch the womenkind at home—at home,te and maybe one or another of them sitting by the window sewing. If there’s a woman sitting by the window sewing, it means that in this modest cottage they are able to keep a hired girl; but they’ll not interrupt her work to tend door. Understand, a hired girl at the doorte is well enough if you can’t do any better, but you can’t depend on her being worth more than about 25 per centte ofte what the average woman of the household would be. Of course you don’t throw a hired girl over your shoulder, which would be flying in the face of Providence, and could bring bad luck; no, you accept what is sent, and be thankful, and don’t grumble; you learn this kind of philosophy in the course of time. Very well, while you’re moping along apparently absorbed in your cares, you’ve got a furtive eye out for business, and you see the woman at the window before she sees you; she’s there to see what she can, and she doesn’t get much to look at. There’s a little yard in front of the cottage, and a paling fence, and a gate, and a walk that goes straight through to the front door, about five steps. Just as you are passing the gate, and looking your saddest, your face suddenlyte lights up, and you stoop down and apparently snake something eagerly out of the mud. The woman sees that episode—you needn’t glance at her to make sure, you know by experience that she’s always taking care of her end of the dramatics.

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Meantime, I have been torturing that woman by dilatorily polishing the mud off the ring while she is itching to get her hands on it. I pass it to her now, and she turns it over and over with delight and desire. Presently she finds the initials and the skewered hearts,te and then one of two things happens, according to the character, training, and social environment of the woman: she either pretends to recognize the ring as her own, by the testimony of the initials, or she frankly says it isn’t her own—or rather her aunt’s; it is most customary for the woman to leave herself out, in these conditions, and make use of an aunt; but it’s all one to me; I’m not particular as to whose ring it’s going to turn out to be. It’s rather unusual for the woman to recognize the ring—with absolute certainty; in rare instances she does, and says it belongs to her aunt, who must have lost it off her finger this morning; but in all the other instances she recognizes it as the property of a friend from the other side of the village, who has been visiting her and has just gone. You mustn’t let that incautiouste remark go by unobstructed,te for you can suffer a damage by it. You must ask her to please give you the address, so that you can go and return the ring and hope to get four or five dollars’te reward for it. You do this because you know that the thought has already entered her mind to propose to keep the ring and restore it to its imaginary ownerte herself, a thing which she can do by giving you a pretty economicalte reward; but you have made trouble when you ask for the address, because, in the first place, there isn’t any address, and, in the second place, you may slip through her fingers if she doesn’t raise the stake. You don’t need to propose to go and hunt up that woman yourself, for she is not going to permit that; she is going to hold on to the ring and satisfy your requirement in the matter of a reward if she can.

There now, don’t you see what a good trade it is, and how certain it is? It doesn’t make any difference to you whether the woman is representing herself, orte an aunt, or whether she is representing a friend on the other side of the town; she’s going to keep the ring and arrange the terms with you at the best figure she can. I am never hard with those people. I generally know by the look of the woman, and her clothes, and the house, and all that, about how much of an outlay she can stand, and so I trade on that basis. She is good for two dollars, always,te for that five-cent ring, and a meal into the bargain if I want it—which I don’t. According to her style and make, she is good for two dollars, three dollars, four dollars;te and it’s not so infrequent as you might suppose,te for me to find women that will add one, two, and even three dollarste to those figures. Taking a season straight through, my accounts show that my average is three dollars and thirty-five cents for a wedding ring. Sometimes it takes me forty minutes to negotiate one; sometimes it takes fifteen minutes. Every now and then I pull off a trade in five minutes; but take the day through, the average is twenty-two minutes—call it four rings per hour. In the long

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The Frenchman’s scheme for working off pewterte watches on pawnbrokers, thereby making a large profit; his clever plan for reimbursing the pawnbrokers; who is the thief in the several transactions involved?

That cunning rascal’s curious history brings back to me, out of the mouldyte past of twenty-five years ago, a matter which is in some degree akinte to it. It was a story which was discussed a good deal at the time, because there was what seemed to be a pretty difficult moral question involved in it. A young Parisian gentleman fell heir to a fortune and ran swiftly through it, by help of the customary aids furnished by fast living. When he realized that all his fortune was gone except his watch, he promptly made up his mind to pawn the watch, spend the resulting proceeds upon a single orgy, and then commit suicide. He was in London at the time. The watch was a Jürgensentean, and worth six or eight hundred dollars. He took it to a pawnbroker; the pawnbroker examined it carefully outside, then opened itte and as carefully examined the works; finally he dipped a camel’s-hair brush into a liquid, touched the ball of the stemwinder with it, paused a moment for the effect—then he indicated by his manner that he was satisfied. He granted the young fellow a loan, at three months, of a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, and kept the watch.

The Frenchman dropped into a brown study on his way out of the shop, and before he had gone far he had made a radical change in his plans, and was resolved to postpone the orgy and try an experiment, and see what would come of it. The touching of the gold ball of the stemwinderte with the camel’s-hair brush had caught his attention; without doubt the liquid upon the brush was an acid, and perhaps that slight application of it was a pawnbroker’s common and only test of the genuineness of the gold of a heavy hunting-case watch. At any rate, one could find out whether this was the custom or not, and it might be profitable to examine into the matter in a practical way. That was the young man’s thought.

He was soon on his way to Switzerland. There he bought two or three sets of watch-works of unimpeachable excellence, and carried them to a competent and obscure constructorte of watches and got them enclosed in heavy cases of fine gold—apparently;

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Even in London there is a limit to pawnbrokers—they are not inexhaustible as to numbers. In the course of time they would all be supplied—then what should he do? Would it be safe to try to furnish them a second supply? Or must he go elsewhere and seek fresh markets in the other European capitals? He thought he would prefer to remain in London, if he could think of a safe way to manage it. Hete contrived one. It was very simple. He tried the experiment and it succeeded. He hired a cheap assistant to pawn the watches to pawnbrokers who had previously been supplied, and fetch home the money and the pawn tickets.

Nowte then, we arrive at the most curious and interesting part of this whole business—and that is this: at bottom that young Frenchman was very sensitive in the matter of morals; he could not bear the thought of cheating those pawnbrokers out of their money; they had done him no harm; they had offended him in no way, and he could not, and must not, have them onte his conscience. He was deeply troubled; along at first he could not sleep. Every day he added two or three hundred dollars to his accumulation of cash, and so the distress at his heart grew daily heavier and heavier.

At last a saving thought occurred to him, and his troubles vanished away. He went out at mid-afternoon with a hatful of pawn tickets in his pocket and started down Regent streette. He drifted through the moving crowd of men and women, watching for the right face—the face which should indicate the presence of a treacherous and dishonest heart in itste owner’s bosom, the face of a person who would rob his fellow man if he could, therefore the face of a person who ought to be made to suffer, and whom nothing but sorrow and loss could reform. Every time the Frenchman, eager to lift up his fallen fellow man and make him better and purer, saw that kind of a face, he dropped a pawn ticket on the pavement—apparently accidentally. There was always one unvaryingte result: that dishonest man glanced sharply around to see if the Frenchman had noticed his loss, but always saw—or thought he saw—that the Frenchman was not aware of the disaster that had happened to him; always, also, the dishonest man instead of flying to the Frenchman and restoring to him his lost property, as a clean and righteous person would have done, eagerly hid the ticket in his pocket and got away with all dispatchte. In the course of time, the Frenchman dropped some thousands of pawn tickets in front of that class of

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You will easily perceive that there is a defect of morals here somewhere, because somebody cheated somebody, and somebody got robbed; but who was it that did the cheating? And who was it that got robbed? The Frenchman never claimed that he was pawning a gold watch; he could never have brought himself to make such a statement; he merely offered the watch without saying anything about its character, and asked for a loan. The pawnbroker estimated the watch’s value for himself and limited the loan to that valuation, therefore the Frenchman did not cheat the pawnbroker. Very well, did anybody cheat him? No. He got all his loan back with interest, from the dishonest finder of the pawn ticket, therefore he suffered in no way. The pawnbroker did not cheat the dishonest finder of the ticket, for the pawnbroker did not know it was a pewterte watch. The fact remains, first and last and all the time, that there was a thief present in this transaction somewhere, and it now seems perfectly plain that the dishonest finder of the ticket was the only improper person connected with the transaction anywhere. He saw the ticket dropped, he could have restored it to the dropper, but he preferred to keep it; therefore he stole it. In paying to the pawnbroker a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars for what he knew to be another man’s watch, he perpetrated a glaring swindle, and since he was himself the person swindled there is no occasion for regrets, because he was also reformed and made clean, at the same time, and this was worth a hundred pewterte watches to him.te However, I will not try to go on any further with this. There are so many different kinds of morality mixed up in it that I find myself getting confused, I not being familiar with any but one kind.te

Mr. Clemens has been taking another vacation, and a flying trip to Bermuda—His experiences with his eighty thousand dollarste in 10 per centte stock—Miss Clemens’s singing on the concert stage a success; she has learned how to please her audiences—Thomas Bailey Aldrich dead; none of the gay company of old left but Mr. Howells and Mr. Clemens—Mr. Clemens has completed the work which remained for him to do—his Autobiography—or enough of it to accomplish his object in writing it: to distribute it through his books and thus secure a new copyright life for them.

I have been taking another vacation—a vacation for which there was no excuse that I can think of except that I wanted to get away from work for a while to appease a restlessness

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This is a sordid and commercialized age, and few can live in such an atmosphere and remain unaffected by it; but I find that even the stock market is like the other interests—it cannot hold my attention long at a time. I have eighty thousand dollars in a 10 per centte stockan, and I was not thinking of selling it, although I bought it to sell. While I was not noticing, it crept up, point by point, each point representing a profit of fifteen hundred dollars, and in the course of two or three weeks it climbed twenty-sixte points, each point, as I have said, standing for a profit of fifteen hundred dollars. If I had been awake I would have sold out and captured that thirty-nine thousand dollars to build the house with—for John Howells has been architecting a house for us, to be built upon the farm near Redding, Connecticut, which we bought a year and a half agoan—but I was asleep, and did not wake up again until yesterday: meantime that stock had been sliding down, and in its descent it had sponged out the entire twenty-six points byte yesterday afternoon. Then I bought some more of it, and made an order for a further purchase this morning if it should fall two or three points lower. I was hoping it would, but it didn’t. It has started up againte and I have recorded one more mistake. I hoped it would go ’way down,te but since it has concluded to go up, I will try to get a sort of satisfaction out of watching its flight. Each ascending point now represents a profit of seventeen hundred and fifty dollars and it has accomplished two points since yesterday afternoon.

The next incident of importance was another tripte to Bermuda a week or two agoan. We went and came in the same ship, as before. The passages to and fro, and the twenty-four hours’ sojourn in those delightful islands, were matters of high importance and enchanting interest for the time being, but already they have shriveled to nothing, and taken their place among the rest of the trivialities of life.

Clara has been barnstorming on the concert stage in New England the past few weeks, and at last she has learned her tradean and is qualified to succeed, and will succeed—a great event for her, and a great event for me. By learning her trade, I mean that by normalte processes her theories, which naturally seemed made of boiler-iron or some other indestructible substance, have been blown to the four windste by experience, that best of all teachers. According to her theories, her first duty was to be faithful to the highest

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Thomas Bailey Aldrich has passed from this life, seventy years oldan. I was not back from Bermuda in time to attend the funeral, and the physicians would not allow Howells to go, he being but lately recovered from a wasting attack of the grippe. He was here yesterday, and naturally we called the roll. So many are gone! Of the gay company of us that used to foregather in Boston, thirty-five years ago and more, not one is left but himselfte and me; and of the New York contingent of that day we could call to mind no conspicuous member still in the flesh except Stedman. We had a right to complain of the order of the procession—disorder is its right name—for almost every one of those old-time friends got his release before he was fairly entitled to it. Howells and I have been postponed, and postponed, and postponed, until the injustice of it is becoming offensive. It is true that Aldrich was entitled to go before Howells, because he achieved his threescorete and ten last November, whereas Howells onlyte attained to that age on the 1st of the present month; but I am seventy-one and four months over—thus I ranked Aldrich by sixteen months—and was entitled to the precedence in the great procession. I do not need to stay here any longer, for I have completed the only work that was remaining for me to do in this life and that I could not possibly afford to leave uncompleted—my Autobiography. Although that is not finished, and will not be finished until I die, the object which I had in view in compiling it is accomplished: that object was to distribute it through my existing books and give each of them a new copyright life of twenty-eight yearsan, and thus defeat the copyright statute’s cold intention to rob and starve my daughters.te I have dictated four or five hundred thousand words of autobiography already, and if I should die to-morrow this mass of literature would be quite sufficient for the object which I had in view in manufacturing it.

That very remarkable woman and exceedingly valuable citizen, Mrs. Kinnicutt, dined with us two or three nights ago, and that other very remarkable woman, Mrs. Draperan, would have come also but an engagement prevented it. Mrs. Kinnicutt said—but I will refer to this lateran.te

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Mr. Clemens’s experience with his copperte stock as advised by Mr. Rogers; his determination to exploit his stocks and bonds according to his own intuitions—Pecuniarily the last twelvemonth would have been more profitable than 1902 if he had acted on his own inspirations—Mr. Clemens buys a hundredte shares of wireless telephonete stock.

I wish to go on for a while cataloguing the things which have happened to me recently, for I find it very interesting to note how important each of them was in its turn, and how quickly it dropped to the rear and became of no consequence. I note one circumstance with high gratification, and that is this: that whereas Mr. Rogers’s fiscal knowledge is better than mine, my fiscal ignorance is better than his fiscal knowledge, every now and then, and that whereas his caution is better than mine, my destitution of it is worth six of it. For instance: a year and a half ago, when he told me to buy that copper stock which I have been talking aboutan, and said that the price would be certain to advance, I wanted to take two thousand shares, which would cost eighty-six thousand dollars, and would come near to exhausting my bank-balance. He said no, take the half of it. To my mind this was not good reasoning. If the price was sure to advance, why shouldn’t one buy all of that stock that he could pay for? However, I respected his judgment, and I took a thousand shares instead of two thousand. I took it at 43; 50 was par. It was a 6 per centte stock and would soon pay 8te. Copper was more precious than gold, and not all the mines in the world could supply the demand. I kept the thousand shares nine months; I collected one 8 per centte dividend and one 10 per centte dividend; then the market price had climbed to 79. I thought I would sell out. Thirty-two thousand dollars’te profit on an investment of forty-three thousand, all in nine months, with four or five thousand in dividends added, seemed to me good enough for so humble a financier as I; but no, Mr. Rogers said, “Sell half; youte couldn’t possibly have anything better than that stock. Sell half, keep the rest.”te I obeyed. By luck, I had bought at the lowest figure; by luck again I sold at the highest figure—79 ¾. As soon as I withdrew my support from that excellent stock it began to drop along down, a point at a time, until two or three months ago, when it seemed to have reached the low water mark at 58. I consultedte Mr. Rogers, and he said yes, buy. I thought of taking the whole mine, but again he was conservative; again he was cautious. He said, “takete what you can pay for and no more, and leave as much money in the bank as you take out of it.”te So I took a thousand shares at 58. I still had five hundred at 43, and so the average cost of the whole was 53. I made up my mind to sell those fifteen hundred shares sure if the price ever reached 79 again. It did reach that figure, but, as I have already explained in an earlier chapter,te I was asleep at the time and failed to secure the forty thousand dollars due me on my judgment. As I have said, the stock began to soar along down until it struck bottom day before yesterday, when I

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There is a new invention. Apparently it is a wireless telephone. Everybody can have the machine in his house, and it has one or two advantages over the telephone that uses a wire. For instance: it records the messages which it receivesan, and it is able to do this when no one is present; therefore you can call up a friend, deliver your message into his house with none to receive it but the machine; when he returns home he can reverse the spool and listen to the message; also it keeps its secrets; they do not pass through a central station to be listened to by the telephone girl and distributed abroad. Some of the Company’s circulars and other advertisements reached me yesterday by mail. I found that I could get a hundred shares of the stock at ten dollarsan a share, if I wanted it, but that I was not privileged to take any more than that. That has a suspicious look; it looks like fishing for widows and orphans, and the clergy. You can float any speculation that

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Upon reflection, I sent a thousand dollars this morning and captured a hundred shares of this gamblean. I was not going to be caught out again. I shall not livete to pay the national debt, but in my dying moments I shall instruct Clara and Jean to attend to it.

The Russian Count’ste luncheon at the St. Regis and his political speech in response to Mr. Clemens’s speech in behalf of the ladies present.

It was my intention to continue and complete the list of important-unimportant happenings which have fallen to my share lately, and no longer ago than yesterday afternoon there was a basketful of them in my head, but to my astonishment they are all gone this morning, and the basket is empty. I am sorry, for as far as I had proceeded in recording them they were a revelation to me of what a diary is, and of necessity must be: fine and precious gold to-day, ashes, and valueless, to-morrowte. Never mind—let it go.

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Some occult instinct seemed to inform me that I was in an embarrassing position, and so I thought it best to secure a moment or two in which to collect my judgment and determine what to do. Then the saving idea came to the rescue, and I went to the Count and said I was gratified by the honor which he had done me, but that it would not be quite properly deferential in me to take precedence of Mr. John Bigelow in so important a matter, I never having served a public office of any kind in my life, whereas Mr. Bigelow had represented the United States in ambassadorial capacities at foreign courts with high and memorable distinction; and I also observed that his age gave him another right of precedence over me, he being past ninetyan, and I only seventy-one—and so, for these various reasons, I ought to follow Mr. Bigelow, not precede him. I offered to go and say these things to Mr. Bigelow, and invite him, in the Count’s name, to speak. The Count thanked me, and I went to Mr. Bigelow with my mission. I can’t help admiring my smartness. It makes me proud every time I think of it—not because I was any smarter than usual, for I wasn’t; I am always smart. Let other people think as they may, I privately know that I am always smart, and as a rule considerably smarter than anybody else—but with this defect: that my smartness heretofore has always arrived a matter of twenty-four hours too late, when it couldn’t do any good, nor attract any attention, nor furnish me any self-admirationte; but this time I was smart right on the spot, and I couldn’t have been smarter if I had had a week to arrange the smartness in. I delivered the message to Mr. Bigelow, and his reply almost snuffed out my admiration of my own smartness, because of the suddenness of his responding smartness and the deep and wise and superiorte character of it. His training as a diplomat showed out very conspicuously. Through my inexperience I had been caught unprepared, and had been stunned, and had been obliged to procrastinate and gain time in which to find out what I would better do; but his trained and educated sagacityte had qualified him to be ready on the moment to meet any exigency, and he was ready this time. He reminded me that this Russian Count and Major Generalte must naturally be on the imperial side in Russia’s present great quarrel with the people of Russia; that I was publicly known to be on the side of the revolutionistsan, where all right feeling Americans ought to be; that the imperialists and the revolutionists

[begin page 19]

“It is possible that if you and I should speak the Count would use the opportunity to introduce Russian politics into his reply; then if his speech should get into print, it could make you and me seem to be in sympathy with the Czar’s side of the questionan, and certainly neither of us would enjoy that. I am not saying that the Count wouldte do this; I am only saying it is a possibility; but no matter, a possibility is enough; the barest possibility is argument enough and reason enough for you and mete to keep silent—but particularly mete. I have no text; I cannot speak without one. It is different with you; you are at your best when you haven’t a text and when you don’t know anything about the subject you are instructing your audience upon. I give you leave to speak, but you mustn’t by any accident make an opening for any political remarks in return. You may praise the Count himself, if you want to, but you are not to say anything about the Czar or the revolution—not even a word.”

I went back to my place and reported results to the ladies in my neighborhood. They said it was quite too bad to leave the matter so; somebody ought to get up and say a pleasant thing about this sumptuous luncheon and pay the Count a handsome compliment or two, and that I ought to do it, and must do it. I said I had no text; that I could not do this complimenting on my own motion; it would be as difficult as it would be for me to get up and compliment myself—in fact more difficult, twice as difficult. They said, “Butte couldn’t you make the speech and the compliment in our behalf—in behalf of the ladies?”te I said, “Certainlyte, I can do that; that will be simple and easy, and I can do it with very real pleasure.”te

So I got up and made the speech. Of course it hadn’t a reference in it to the Czar, or to Russia, or to the Duma, or to the revolution, or to the daily slaughter of the helpless Jews that that infamous Government has been carrying on daily for two yearsan. It confined itself strictly to the ladies, and their thanks.

Then straightway the wisdom of that old diplomat was confirmed: thete Count got up and made a political speech!te It was ludicrously out of harmony with the light stuff which I had been delivering there. It was odd enough to hear a man respond to a batch of gilded and lightsome personal compliments with a flowing stream of memorized adulations of the Russian Emperortean, and his great and good and divine nature and noble and beneficent intentions. Certainly a memorized speech can be a grotesque thing when you can’t know what sort of a speech it is destined to respond to. A practisedte talker like Choatean would make a memorized speech look convincingly as if every word of it had been suggested by some remark in the speechte which preceded it. Choate would have found a word somewhere in my speech—even if he had to invent that word himself and insertte it—that would have made the Count’s speech look quite satisfactorily impromptu, but the Count lacked that art. Without a single preliminary word, and without a single reference to what I had been saying, he jumped right into his memorized adulations, and I think it was the funniest incident of the kind I have ever seen in an after-dinner experience of forty years.

[begin page 20]

Mr. Clemens walks home from the St. Regis luncheon; on the way he thinks about the Christian Union article and wishes he had a copy of it; at 42d street a stranger puts the clippings concerning that article into his hand, saying he was just going to mail them to him.

Somete months ago I commented upon a chapter of Susy’s Biography wherein she very elaborately discussed an article about the training and disciplining of children, which I had published in the Christian Union,te (this was twenty-one years ago), an article which was full of worshipful praises of Mrs. Clemens as a mother, and which little Clara, and Susy, and I had been hiding from this lovely and admirable mother because we knew she would disapprove of public and printed praises of herself.te At the time that I was dictating thosete comments, several months ago, I was trying to call back to my memory some of the details of that article, but I was not able to do it, and I wished I had a copy of the article so that I could see what there was about it which gave it such large interest for Susyan.

Yesterday afternoon I elected to walk home from the luncheon at the St. Regis, which is in 55th streette and Fifth Avenue, for it was a fine spring day and I hadn’t had a walk for a year or two, and felt the need of exercise. As I walked along down Fifth Avenue the desire to see that Christian Unionte article came into my head again. I had just reached the corner of 42d streette then, and there was the usual jam of wagons, carriages, and automobiles there. I stopped to let it thin out before trying to cross the street, but a stranger, who didn’t require as much room as I do, came racing by and darted into a crack among the vehicles and made the crossing. But on his way past mete he thrust a couple of ancient newspaper clippings into my hand, and said,

“There, you don’t know me, but I have saved them in my scrap-book for twenty years, and it occurred to me this morning that perhaps you would like to see them, so I was carrying them down town to mail them, I not expecting to run across you in this accidental way, of course; but I will give them into your own hands now. Good-byete”—and he disappeared among the wagons.

Those scraps which he had put into my hand were ancient newspaper copies of that Christian Unionte article!te It is a handsome instance of mental telegraphy—or if it isn’t that, it is a handsome case of coincidence.

The battles of Navarino and Lepanto and the princes of Montenegro: all an annoyance to Mr. Clemens—Mr. Williamte T. Stead appoints Mr. Clemens a member of the International Peace Convention; he and Mr. Stead discuss the appointment—President Roosevelt the most popular human being that ever

[begin page 21]

I note with satisfaction that the last survivor of the battle of Navarino is deadan. Perhaps we shall now have a rest from that battle. I seem to be including everybody, but it is merely a manner of speech; I am meaning only myself. The battle of Navarino has been an annoyance to me all my life. I cannot remember back to the time when the mention of that battle did not irritate me. It is not that I had any grudge against the battle itself; it is only that I never could separate it from the battle of Lepanto. I know of nothing that is more troublesome than a confusion of that kind; we all have them; no one is free from them; they embitter life and make existence a weariness. I have always known that it was in one of these battles that Cervantes was wounded, but I never could tell which battle it was without consulting the Cyclopediate again. I have worn out many and many a Cyclopediate in settling which battle it was, but I never could make the information stay after I had acquired it. I have consulted the Cyclopediate again, and this time I find, as usual, that it was in the Lepanto fight that Cervantes was woundedan. It is the hundred and fiftieth time that I have found that out, and it is about the hundredth time that I have wished he had been wounded in both those battles; then I could keep his record clear and my own mind at rest. The fact that one of the battles was older than the other by about three centuries is of no help to me; in my muddled head they stick together, and I cannot separate them. But the thing that interests me is the curious fact that I should get a personal satisfaction out of the death of the last survivor of Navarino, for I had nothing against him; I was only tired of his battle. Now then—but never mind, let it go; it is not worth while to try to analyze my feeling; I should never be able to do it; it is like the feeling which I have harbored against the princes of Montenegro for forty years. That name always irritates me; still there is something like a definite reason for it—a trivial one, and yet, in effect, a reason. Forty years ago, when a party of us representing the Quaker City Excursion were examining the sights of Paris and arrived at the tomb of Napoleon, we were halted outside and informed that the Prince of Montenegro was visiting the tomb and we must wait until he was done with it. We were kept outside half an hour, and time was very precious to us cheap pilgrims. I had never heard of him before, but I inquired and found that he owned a farm in the neighborhood of Turkey somewhere, and raised rocks on it—not an important farm, but since it was a principality it made the Prince of Montenegro a person of consequence and set him up among the royalties. Years afterward, when I had acquired a family and we were traveling about Europe, I engaged rooms by telegraph in a hotel in Venicean and when we arrived there, tired and worn, we found our quarters occupied. The landlord explained that he had been obliged to give them to the Prince of Montenegro, who had arrived unexpectedly. These were the beginnings of a procession of interruptions of my comfort and repose, by the princes of Montenegro, which has extended down to the present time. I do not go to Europe any more, on account of the princes of Montenegro. They have stepped into my way as many as a dozen times; they have been one of the chief annoyances of my life;

[begin page 22]

And this reminds me that I came across William T. Stead yesterday. He is over here to take part in an International Peace Convention which is to assemble a week or ten days from now. His project is to select one or two widely known men in each country and band them together in a commission, which shall visit all the presidents and crowned heads and persuade them to endorse and support a proposition to be laid before this year’s Hague Tribunal. The idea is to have that Tribunal pass an international law requiring quarreling States about to go to war to postpone overt action until thirty days after they shall have made up their minds to draw the sword. This is to give time for the other States of Christendom to try to pacify the belligerents and compromise the quarrel, and prevent the war. As one of the members of the American contingent of this roving commissionan, Mr. Stead had nominated me, but I told him I could not serve; that my active days were over, and that even short journeys were a distress to me, and I could not think of venturing a long one. He said it was hardly my privilege to decline this great service; that it was my duty to do everything that in me lay to advance the human race, as long as the breath should remain in my body. But I said it was not worth while, for the reason that you can’t advance the human race and make it stay advanced; that every time you propped up its wobbling form on one side it toppled over on the other; that all its affairs are transitoryte and unstable, and none of them important, for that reason; that all ameliorations of the condition of the human race are impermanent; as soon as you reform them in one particular the race breaks out, in another place, worse than ever; that it is a weary and unprofitable enterprise to keep on calking a rickety old ship that springs a new leak every time you calk an old one—and so on, and so on, a long chapter of discussion between us without a result, he holding that the affairs of the human race are important, worth our best efforts for their improvement and our loyal belief in the proposition that the improvement can be made permanent, and I denying these things in detail and in mass. Stead has a large reverence for the human race and a strong belief in its far-reachingte intelligence and wisdom; I don’t know where he got it, but that is his affair, not mine. Stead is a strong man and a good man, and I think he is almost always in the right. Stead is not popular in England, where he belongsan. This is sufficiently good evidence that both his head and his heart are right—at least I look at it in that way. Presidentte Roosevelt is to-day, by very long odds—overwhelming odds—the most popular being, human or divine, visible or invisible, that has ever sojourned in America. I think it is a very damaging fact, and ought to make the President distinctly uncomfortable.

In view of the things which I have just been saying, the following letter has an odd interest for me. It arrived this morning from Canada, and was written three days ago.

[begin page 23]

The “Wapping Alice” storyan.te

At the banquet in honor of Ambassador Tower, last nightan, I encountered a guest, whote greeted me with a formula which I hear pretty often, particularly from elderly people—

“You don’t remember me?”

I confessed. Then he told me his name. The name did not help me, I still didte not remember him. He said he would give me a pointer: which he did with a remark in which he lightly dropped a name—“Wapping Alice.” Full lightly he dropped it, yes, but in my private breast it made a bang like a bombshell! I remembered him then; he was a minor character in a very dramatic episode which enacted itself in our housean many many years agote—twenty-seven, to be precise. It came back to me with a sharp and sudden vividness, and I saw the whole thing again, just as it hadte happened so long ago; it flashed upon me bright and intense, like a midnight landscape revealed by a flood of lightning. I saw all the actors in the event, too, even to the clothes they wore, though they are all dead these many years, except this banquet-guest and me—yes, and one otheran.te

I do not remember the real name of the Swede who figures in the drama, I only remember the fantastic name our servants furnished him with, but it will answer, for it is a plenty good enough name, for him or forte anybody else. The time was 1880.te

Itte was on the 2dte of January of that year that we added Wapping Alicete to our household staff.

According to her story she was born and reared in that part of London which is called Wapping,1880te and the other servants soon got to calling her Wapping Alice to distinguish her from our other Alice, the colored cookan.te She came to us fresh from England; she brought note recommendations, but we took her on her face. She soon made her way. She was good-heartedte and willing, she fitted neatly into her place, the children grew fond of her, everybodyte on the place had a good word for her, and we were glad of the luck that threw her in our way. She was a little frisky with herte h’s, but that was nothing.te

[begin page 25]

It is very creditable to his ingenuity that he was able to masquerade as a girl seven months and a half under all our eyes and never awake in uste doubt orte suspicion. It must not be charged that a part of the credit is due to our dulness; for no one can say that our friends and neighbors were dull people, and they were deceived as completely as we were. They knew Alice almost as well as we knew him, yet no suspicion of the fraud he was playing ever crossed their minds. He must have had years of apprenticeship in his part, or he could not have been so competentte in it. Why he unsexed himself waste his own affair. In the excitement of the grand climax in August the matter was overlooked and he was not questioned about it.

For convenience, now, I will stop calling him “he.” Indeed, with that fair and modest and comely young creature framedte before me now in the mirror of my memory, it is awkward and unhandy to call it anything but “she.”

Wappingte Alice took up her abode with us on the 2dte of January. The kitchen was an independent annex, built against the north side of the house; the house-entrance tote it was from the dining room. It consisted of two stories and a cellar; this latter was a laundry, and communicated with the house-cellar. Itte also had a door which opened upon the steep hillside, above the brook. All about our house was open ground; sote it stood by itself. When it was locked up for the night, communication with the kitchen-annex was shut off, and the annex became in effect an independent establishment. Afterte that, if the occupants of it wishedte to indulge in privacies of their own they had their opportunity: we should know nothing about it.

Wappingte Alice and the cook had adjoining bedrooms on the second floor of the annex, over the kitchen. At fivete in the morning, February 2dte, the burglar alarmte let go with an urgent clatter, and I was out on the floor before I was awake. Before I was fairly into the bath-roomte the clatter stopped. I turned up the gas and looked at the annunciator. One of the metal tabs was down, and was still wagging with excitement. The number exposed by it indicated the laundry door which opened upon the hillside. That was a curious thing. What was there in the annex that a burglarte might want? And why should he want it so early in the morning? And the weather so bitter cold, too. Ought I to go all the way down there and inquire? My curiosity was strong, but not strong enough for that. I went back to bed, and reported progress. I said there was no present danger. We could wait,te and listen for the alarm again. In case it should indicatete that the burglar was breaking into the dining room, we could collect the children and climb out of the front window. Then we went to sleep.

At fivete the next morning the alarm rang again. I went in the bath-roomte and looked, and it was the laundry door once more. At breakfast I told George about it. He could not account for it, but thought maybe Patricktean had taken a notion to come at that strangete hour and fertilize the furnace because of the exceeding sharpness of the weather. It turned out that Patrickte had better sense. All the same the laundry rang us up at fivete on

[begin page 26]

“I thought that would fetch you!te How much did they get?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know your house has been burglarized?”

“No.”

“George wanted it keptte out of the papers—teso it didn’t get in; butte I supposed he telegraphed youte.”

“No, I haven’tte heard of it.”

Thete house and the grounds had a lonesome and forsaken look. I rang,te and got no answer. I walked all about the place, but found no one. The horses were in the stable,te but Patrickte and his family were gone. I went backte and was going to open the front door with a latch-key, but concluded to try the knob first. The door swungte open! It seemed ante odd state of things for a house that had so lately had experience of burglars. I went all over the house and the annex. Everything was in good order, but there were no human beings anywhere. So I lit up, in the library, and sat down to read and smoke, and wait.

I waited until ten at night, then George arrived. When he opened the door and saw me and the other lightste, he was astonished.

“Why, when did you come, sirte!”

I answered with austerityte—meaning to impress him—te

“More than three hours ago—and found the house absolutely unprotected. The whole tribe away; no one left to take care of the place. What do you think of that kind of conduct? A burglar could have emptied the house,te unmolested.”

George was not impressed. He laughed a comfortable, care-free laugh, and said—

[begin page 27]

“Do you mean to say that you keep the alarm onte, day and night both?”

“No, sir, don’t keep it on at all, generally.te Just the fact is a plenty. They ain’t going to meddle here.”

“You think so, do you? Where have you all been?”

“Beente down the river on the excursion boat.”

“All of you?”

“Yes, sir, the whole bilin’.”

“I think it’s scandalous. Even if there is a burglar alarm, I think you might at least lock the front door when you desert the house.”

George smiled ate placid smile, and said, almost languidly—te

“Well, now, we ain’t quite so far gone as all that, Mr. Clemens.te Wheneverte we go we always lock the front door, and—”

“George, I came in without a latch-key.”

George caught his breath with a gasp, and reeled in his tracks.te The next moment he was flying up stairs like a rocket. I was almost as much startled as he was. He was gone five minutes, then he came drooping into the room, limp and weak, and swabbing his face, which had paled to the hue of old amber. He came and leaned against the bookshelveste near me, and waited a little to get his breath, his breast rising and falling with his pantings. Then he gave his face a final wipe, and said—

“My souls, Mr. Clemens,te what a turn you did gimme! The front door not even on the latch, and fifteen hundred dollars hard-earned money up there betwixt my mattresseste!”

“Oh,” I said, “I see!te Tote leave myte things unprotected is a small matter;te but when it imperils yours it’s quite another matter. I’m ashamedte of you, George.”

“Well, now I come to look at it, I dunno but I feel mostly the same way.”te

“How did you come to have all that money in the house?—you that let on to be so careful about always banking the results ofte your pious robberies. Have you beente betting on the revival-catch again? Is there another religious epidemic in your African church?”

I could see that that wounded him—poor old George. I knew it would, for it was probably true. It had been charged against him by the brother whom he supplanted as deacon of the church, and it was a sore spot with George, who always said it was a slander; but as he never went quite far enough to say it was a lie, and as he was something of a purist in language, this subtle discrimination was noticed by the family, to his damage. Out of love, they did not twit him with it; but out of love, I did—and rubbed it in,te sometimes.

“Mr. Clemens,te you oughtn’t to talk so—because I never done it. I do bet on horse-races, and elections, and sprints, and base ball, and foot-ballte, and everything that ain’t sinful and got money in it, but I never done that.”

“You didn’t, didn’t you? Well, let it go, for this time—though Ite suppose you did. Where did you get thiste fifteen hundred?”

[begin page 28]

“George! do you mean to say that you have been five hundred miles from home and left nobody but women in the house all that time?”

Butte George was not much troubled. He said—

“I only went for three or fourte days, and it ain’t likely that anybody would break into the house in that little time. Especially where there’s an alarm. Andte Patrickte was right there in histe house, anyway, and nothing to do but ring him up.”

I had now artfullyte worked George up to the right place to spring my surprise upon him, and I touched it off:

“George, you haven’t telegraphed anything to me lately; through your happy relations with the press, the papers have been muzzled. And so you think you have managed to hide something away which you didn’t want me to find out. But your hand was not well played. George, I know everything. This house has been burglarized! And on top of this, you all go off larking and leave it to be burglarized again. Now what do you think of yourself!”

It didn’t phaze him. It didn’t start a hair. It left him as serene as a summer morning. He was thete most provoking creature about making a person’s calculations all go for nothing. A pleasant smile allowed a wink of his white teeth to show for a moment, and he said, comfortably—

“There hain’t been no burglars here, Mr. Clemens.te Nary a burglar.”

“Now you know better. Mr. C—ante told me, as I came up from the station.”

“Yes, sir. Well, he done right. Ite put that up on him.te I done it for a purpose.”

“You did, did you? Well, what was your purpose?”

“I’m going to tell you all about it, Mr. Clemens.te You see, there was something happened herete in the house, and it was a mystery. Yes, sir, that is what it was; it was a mystery.te I reckoned it would get out, and get in the papers, and then the family would be worried, and you would come flying here, four hundred miles, and no use in it. Fact is, I knowed the other servants couldn’t keep it, and I knowed they would rutherte have something big to tell than something little, so I come flat out and told them to say it was a burglar. That pleased them, of course, and they done it. Then the rest of it was easy for me. I went down to the papers and told them a noble good lie—because that ain’t no sin when you are trying to do good by it—and asked them to keep still and not scare the burglars out of town, for I was right on their track; and so they done it. Nowte then, the thing that did happen was like this. Last Sunday we all went up to Northamptonte on a little excursion—”

“Well, by gracious! The whole tribe,te of course.”

“No, sir, not all,te that time. Three or four of Patrick’ste children warn’t veryte well, but most of the others went, and Bridget andte Patrick.te And the rest of us went, except Wapping Alice. She allowed she’dte stay at home and take care of the house, and she done it.”

“She shall have a monument.”

“Yes, sir. Well, we missed the connection at Springfield,te so we comete back home. We

[begin page 29]

“So then we come back, and looked the house over,te and nothing was gone. That is,te I told them to search the house and I would search the annex. We set here and talked it over, and over, and over, and over. Couldn’t seem to get enoughte of it. I told them everything was all rightte, in the annex, and Wapping Alice sleeping like a graveyard; nothing hadn’t disturbed her. So then we agreed on burglary, and they said they would go out and take a walk. I judged they would. And I judged it would be a long one, if they met up with a good many friends that was interested in burglaries.

“I had a chance to set down and think, now. I turned this and that andte t’otherte thing over in my headte for about an hour, and pieced them together,te and when I was done I had made up my mind. What do youte reckon it was, Mr. Clemens?”te

“I don’t know. What was it,te George?”

“Well, sir, this was it. I says to myself, I don’t want to wrong nobody, and anybody that knows me knows it ain’t my disposition; but it’s my opinion that Wapping Alicete ain’t what she ought to be.”

“Oh, nonsense!”

“I hope it is, Mr. Clemens;te there wouldn’t be anybody gladder than me; for I am like the rest—I like Wapping Alice, and wouldn’t hurt a hair of her head for the world. And she’s far from her home and her people, too, poor thing, and I ain’t no dog, and can feel for that.”te

“What things did you piece together, George, to build up that wild idea?”

“Well, sir,te it’s curious. The first thing that come into my head didn’t seem to have any business there, and took me by surprise. Do you remember, sir,te the time the alarm went off three mornings last February, long before daylight? That was it. You know it warn’t ever accounted for.”

“I know, but how does that connect itself with this remote matter?”

“Well, the third morning, Wapping Alice was in the breakfast room when we was all talking about it; and she asked me what a burglar alarm was, and I told her. Now, Mr. Clemens,te the landryte didn’t wake you up any more after that.”

[begin page 30]

“The next thing that come into my head was this. Last January thete plumbers ripped out some wood-workte to get at a leakyte pipe, and a young carpenter was here a couple of days putting it back. A young Swede he was, by the name of Bjurnsen Bjuggersen Bjorgensenan. Turrible name, and oversized him considerable, so it seemed to me, but that was it—or in that neighborhood.te He set around in the kitchen a good deal, chatting, because he was working by the day and that always makes a person tirederte than the other kind, and so we all got to know him pretty well, and liked him. About the 1stte June I went into Wapping Alice’s room one morning, and there was a suit of men’s clothes laying there, and she was half-soling the seatte of the pants. I asked her about it and she said she was mending them up for the young carpenter—he asked her to do it. So that come into my head, now, I didn’t know why.

“Thinking it over, I remembered another thing. When I was telling her about the burglar alarm that morning, I smelt her breath, and there was liquor on it. That was curious, because there ain’t any but locked-upte liquor in this house, and I keep the key. She got that liquor outside. I never thought any morete about it then; butte this time when it come up in my mind, I reckoned maybe she turned out at fivete in the morning, being dry, which is natural to the English, and tramped down to the Unionte and moistened up. Well, it would have made a fine stir if she had done it in women’s clothes. Sote I judged maybe she disguised herself as a man and done it. How does that seem to strike you?”te

“Pretty thin, George. Still, it will do for a link if you can’t find anything better.”

“But I reckon I can. Ite told the girls I found Wapping Alice sleeping like a graveyard. It warn’t strictly true, Mr. Clemens.te She warn’t in her room; she warn’t in the house at all.”

“Is that so?”

“She warn’t in the house at all. Now, then, when I had thought out my think, I says to myself, it stands like this: Wapping Alice knowedte we was to be off on the excursion two days—”

“Two days! Well, I’ll be—”

“Mr. Clemens,te you oughtn’t to swear.”

“I didn’t swear, and I wasn’t even thinking of it. But a person could be forgiven for it if he did, considering the way things go on in this house the minute we turnte our backs. Go on!”

“Well,te as I was saying, sir,te I says to myself it stands like this: Wapping Alice couldn’t know we were back and down there chatting in the library, and so, being dry, she reckoned she was perfectly safe to slip on her breeches and things and go out and oil up. If it was her, she heard me shout, and knowed she was out of luck this time. And if it was her, she would know we wouldn’t be in the house long, but would go out excursioning around somewhere and passing the time, then she could slide back and get into her own clothes again. So I just set still and waited. Well, sir, sure enough, just as it was getting most dark, herete she comes stretching and yawning into the library in her own clothes, and let on to be astonished to see me back from Northampton,te and said she had most slept her head off, and I said, pretty sharp, ‘Blamete your catste you ought to

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“George, you are always right. Half the time I don’t believe it, but to keep peace in the family it is safest to let on to. It’s an idiotic family, and thinks you know more than the dictionary. You have figured this matter out pretty well, for an unprofessional, but it is pretty hard on Wapping Alice, George. To sum up, what do you think of her now?”

“Well, Mr. Clemens,te I still think what I said before: she ain’t what she ought to be.”

“You don’t think there is anything really bad about her, do you?”

“Yes, sir, I do. I think she drinks.”

“Is thatte all?”

Georgete was speechless for a moment, then he said, with deep solemnity—

“All? Mr. Clemens,te ain’t that enough?”

I had a reason for asking the next question.

“George, are you sure—I mean are you perfectly sure—that you aren’tte a little prejudiced against Alice?”

It made George uncomfortable. I was expecting it would. He coughed an embarrassed coughte or two, loosened his collar with his fingers, and presently found speech.

“You mean the joke she played on me,te Mr. Clemens?”te

“Yes.”

“Well, sir, I give you my word I done quit worrying ’bout it. It was scanlous—it was just scanlous—but she didn’t mean no harm. There ain’t no malice in her. She’s the best-heartedte girl there is; and if a person is pore or in trouble there ain’t nothing she won’t do for them. They can have everything she’s got; and everything anybody else has got, too, if she can get aholt of it. Butte—when it comes to joking—oh, my land! Mr. Clemens,te she can’t help it; it’s born in her. She ain’t got no resisting power. If she see a chance to play a joke and couldn’t play it, I believe it would kill her. She keeps the kitchen in a sweat; we don’t ever know what’s acomingte next. Now then—”

“George, you are wandering from the subject. You always do, when I bring up that joke. I never can manage to pump your version of it out of you. You always go palavering off on side issues. Why is that?”

“Now Mr. Clemens,te I don’t like to talk about that joke. It was just scanlous. Why, it went all over this countyte; yes, sir, andte clean out to Gilroy.te Everybody knows me in this town, little and big; and I hardly das’t tote show up anywheres for four weeks, they kept at me so. Now Major Kinney, and Mr. Bunce, and Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Hubbard, and Gen’lan—”te

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George cheered up and looked relieved.

“No, sir, not as I remember. What would I do it for?”

“Well, your tale makes me think it will bear it. I wonder at you, George. Such a good detective and not think of that.”

We went down and examined; and sure enough the ends of thete metal pegs which made the electric connection had been filed off till they no longer touched the plate when the door was swung open.

“George, you explained the function of these pegs to Wapping Alice?”

“Yes, sir; and of course she went and filed them off, and that door hain’t been on the alarm since the first week of last February. I ain’t got no more to say; I’m just a fool.”

“No, you mustn’t say that, because it includes me, and isn’t respectful. I ought to have examined the door last February.”

II

Up to this time this whole matter had seemed trifling to me, but it suddenly began to look cloudy, now. The laundry door had been tampered with for a purpose. George said—

“Yes sir; andte it was done so as Wapping Alice could put on men’s clothes and slide out whenever she wanted to, and liquor up. I am more set, now, than ever, that that girl ain’t what she ought to be. Mr. Clemens,te if I had my way, I’d make her take the pledge before she’s a day older; I’d do it as shore as I’m ate standing here.”te

Privately,te I went further than that. I believed that Alice was harboring sneak-thieves. I felt sure that an exhaustive search of the house would show that a thousand little things had been carried off.

I resolved to hold a court in the morning, and fan out the evidence and get at the bottom factste of this dark episode.te I woke refreshed, and ready for business. Eager to begin, too; all alive with the noveltyte and interest and mystery of the situation, and sure I could manage itte in as imposing style as any detective in the land, except George. When George brought up my breakfast we discussed and matured the plans; then he went down and sent up the witnesses, one at a time, and I questioned them separately. Last of all came Wapping Alice. She had on a white summer gown, with a pink ribbon at the throat,te and looked very neat and comely and attractivete and modest; also troubled and downcast. I questioned her gently, on this, that andte the other point, and found her cautious, evasive and reluctant. She kept slipping through my fingers all the time; I never could quite catch her, anywhere. I was forced to admire her penetration and her ingenuity. I was not able to arrange anyte trap which she would walk into. Still I was making progress, and she could see it. She didte not know what the previous witnesses had said, and this was a hindrance to her. Every now and then, consequently, I was able to drop a surprise

[begin page 33]

However, I gradually drove her into a corner; and at last when I thought the right time had come, I sprung my final surprise and showed all my cards. I wove the storieste of the servants into a clear and compact narrative, and reeled it off like a person who had been behind the door and seen it all. The astonishmentte that rose in her face, and grew, and grew, as I went along—ah, well, it was an inspiration to me! It was as if I was plucking the secretest privacies out of her heart, one by one, and displaying them before her amazed eyes.te When I had finished she seemedte dazed, and said humbly—

“I see it is no use, sir; you know all. I am a poor friendlesste girl. I do not know what to do,” and she stood there pitifully twining and untwining her fingers and gazing down at the carpet. And to tell the truth, it brought the moisture to my eyes.te

“Make a clean breast, Alice; it is the only wise and honest thing to do.”

After a struggle she said she would do it, and she began. This is the substance of her story.te

That young Swede, Bjurnsen Bjuggersente Bjorgensen,te did some joiner-work in the house in January, and when itte was finishedte he was out of work and remained so. In the kitchen they all liked him and were sorry for him.te Presently he had nowherete to sleep and nothing to eat. She took pity on him and secretly allowed him to sleep in our main cellar—in a part of it which had been walled off for a bowling alley and afterwards neglected and never used, and never visited. She made a pallet for him there. Also she carried food there for him. She warned him to enter, nights,te before Patrick went his final rounds—teten o’clock—teand get out before hete came in the morning to replenish the furnace. There was a lockte on the laundryte door, but it was never used; the burglar alarm was protection enough. She knew the lock was not used, but she knew nothing about the burglar alarm. She learned about it the third timete that it raisedte me out of bed. George explained the thing to her; then Bjurnsen Bjorgensen filed off the ends of the metal pegs, and after that he came and went at any hour he pleased.te

“Ever since?”

“Yes sir; he has slept in the cellar all these months. When there was excursions he would come daytimes. He was free of the whole house, then. But he never took anything, sir. He was perfectly honest. I mended his clothes for him, I made that pallet for him, I fedte him all these months. I hope you will forgive me, sir; I’m but a poor girl and I never meant any harm.”

“Forgive you? Why, hang it, you poor good-hearted thing,te you haven’t done anything to forgive. I was afraid he was a thief, that’s all. And so there’s been all this pow-wow about just nothing. I thought there was going to be something dramatic, something theatrical, and now it’s all spoiltte; it’s enough to make a man swearte. You ought to be taken out and drowned for it. But never mind, let it go; there’s nothing but disappointments in this world, anyhowte. Gote along about your work, and leave me to my sorrows.

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Shete suddenly broke down andte burst out sobbing as if her heart would break.te

“Grateful? Himte? Oh, sir, he—he—” Through the breaks in her sobs words escaped which conveyed a paralysing revelation.

“What!”te

“Oh, dear-dear, it is too true, sir—andte now he won’t marry me! And I a poor friendless girl in a strange land.”

“Won’t marry you! Oh, he won’t, won’t he? We’ll see about that!”

The rage I was in—well, a rage like that exhausts a person more in half an hour than a forty-mile walk. I sent the girl away and got back to bed. I told her to keepte her secret to herself and tell George I wanted to see him. When he came I spread the ghastly facts before him, and they nearly straightened his wool with horror and indignation. And he was astonished and grieved at young Bjorgensen’s conduct. He said he was as nice and good-hearted and manly a young fellow as he ever saw, and he couldn’t ever have dreamed such things of him.

First, we telephoned for Reverend Thomas X.; next,te we laid plans for the marriage of that couple. I said I would teach that scampte a lesson that he wouldn’t forget till he was a widower. By the time the plans were completed, Mr. X. was with us. The Reverend Joe Twichellte was off on his vacationan, and Tom was supplying his pulpit. Next to Joe, he was the choicest man in the world for this kind of a circus. He was lovely, all through, like Joe, and he had Joe’s luxuriant passion for adventure and doing good. He was fatter than Joe; a good deal fatter, and the hot weather made a kind of perennial water-works of him; but no matter, his good heart was touched by the tale wete told him, and hete was ready to shed his last drop of perspiration in the cause, for he knew our Alice well, and liked her, and was outraged by her pitiful fate. He took the names and ages of the couple, and wentte off down to the town clerk’s to get the licensete. He was to arrive at our house at sevente sharp, in the evening, and shut himself up in the bath-roomte attached to what we called the schoolroom, and sweat there till he was wantedte; it was on the second floor, over the library.

Wapping Alice was to send a note by hand to her unintentionalte intended, and invite him to come out atte eightte o’clock sharp, and spend the evening.

George was to telephone the chief of policean andte ask him to furnish me an officer in plain clothes, and have him at the house at sharp seven thirtyte, where George would be on the lookout for him and shut him up in the library. He was to stay there until I should ring a bell—one stroke.te

I was to be alone in the schoolroom at eightte; Wappingte Alice was to receive Bjuggersente Bjorgensen at the front door, betray him into the schoolroom, where I was,te and thente glide into the nursery, adjoining,te and leave him to me.

At sixte in the evening the servants were to be let into the secret. They were then to dress in gala; then shut themselves up in the kitchen and stay there until I rang three bells—the signal that the wedding was ready to begin, and witnesses wanted.

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My native appetite for doing things in a theatrical way feasted itself with a relish on this spectacular program. George admired the arrangement, too, and was proud of his share in contriving it. He said it was one of the showiest things he had ever helped to put together. Then we fidgeted around and waited. It was a feverish long afternoon for us, but it dragged itself through, and the twilight began to gather and deepen at last.

No hitch occurred anywhere. Eachte actor was in his place at his appointed time. At sevente the Reverend Tom arrived, andte was shown up stairs and shut into the bath-roomte; at seven thirtyte the policeman arrived and was shut up in the library; at seven forty-fivete I was in the schoolroom; at eightte the bridegroom was with me, and the bride had taken post in the nursery. The curtain was up, the performance ready to begin.te

Bjorgensen was startled when he saw me, and began to apologize, supposing there had been a mistake; but I said it was all right, I was expecting him. He did not want to sit down, and said he should feel more comfortable standing; but I insisted persuasively, and presently he yielded and took a chair—the edge of it. He seemed a good deal perplexed, and a trifle uneasy.

He was a handsome young fellow, with a good face and ate clear eye, and I noticed with some concern that he was able to throw me out of the window in case he should want to. His Alice had fed him well.te I opened up the conversation with ordinary topics, for it was my purpose to thaw him out and get him into a comfortable and persuadable frame of mind before I should enter upon the main business. I meant to keep at him until I made him laugh, if it took all night. It was hard work, and long; but it won. At the end of half an hour he let go a hearty and unconstrained laugh, and I recognized that things were in shape now to call game.

So then I drifted along gradually into a revealment of the fact that I knew he had been sleeping in our cellar for months; that he had been seen to pass through the house; and that he had destroyed the electric connection which guarded the laundry and indeed the whole establishment. I told the story sorrowfully, and in a reproachful voice, and the cheerfulness gradually faded out of his face, and his head droopedte in shame.

There was a painful silence now, for some moments, for I pausedte to let the effects work up; then I said—

“Alice was your benefactor—your benefactor, do you understand? She saved you, she nourished you, she protected you when you were friendless. And forte reward—you take away her purity!”

He jumped as if he had been shot, and his face was transfigured with fury.

“I? Who says I did!”

“She says so.”

“She lies! To the bottom of her soul she lies!”

Confound him, he almost convinced me. He went raging up and down the room, denying, protesting, almost crying; and really it was pitiful to see. But I had my duty to

[begin page 36]

“You see, there is really only one right and honorable thing for you to do—only one—you must marry her.”

It warmed his fury up to boiling-point again.

“Marry her! I’d see her hanged a hundred times, first, and then I wouldn’t. Marry her! Why in the nation should I marry her?”

“Why, what objection have you?”

“Objection! Oh, great guns! Why I don’t care anything for her beyond warm friendship—there’s no love. Why in the world should I marry her?—I don’t want a wife.”

I said, coaxingly—te

“Ah, but consider the hard circumstances. Here she is,te a poor girl far from home, and her good name gone; surely you will have pity on her. Think—teto you is granted a gracious and noble privilege: you can make an honest woman of her.”

“But I don’t want the privilege; and I won’t have it! If her character needs coopering up, Ite can’t help that. It isn’t any affair of mine. Why am Ite selected out for the job. Privilege, you call it! It just makes me want to rip and curse—that’s what it does.”

I soothed him further. At least I meant it for that.

“Mind, Bjorgensen, I am not blaming you for denying it—far from it. Anybody would—first off; I would myself. For when we are excited we say thingste which we are not really responsible for. I am not blaming you. You are excited, now; but when you get cool, and are your own honest, honorable self again—”

He threw up his hands in a sort of agony of despair, and said—

“Ah, how did I ever get into this awful mess! Mr. Clemens,te don’tte you believe me?—can’t you believe me?”

Hang it, I was touched; but I had a duty to perform, and I put my weakness aside and kept my grip. By gentle persuasions I at last got the young fellow to come and sit down again; and with a proper delicacy I turnedte my head away, for the tears were running down his face. I said—

“Wellte, you know, Bjorgensen, that I haven’t merely Alice’s testimony. It is formidablyte backed up—more than that—convincingly backed up—made unshakable—”

“How?”

“By circumstantial evidence. You spent a hundred and fifty nights in our cellar; your presence was known to only one person; that person secretly fed and bedded you there; that person was a simple, confiding, unprotected girl. Answer me, now, out of your own common sense: with these facts back of Alice’s testimony, what would a jury say?”

It wrung a groan from him.

“Lord help me!” he said. “I never thought of that; never thought how it would look.”te He sat silent a while—hunting for a straw to catch at. Then he said, in an aggressive tone,

[begin page 37]

“Burglaryte, for instance?”

It made him jump.

“Mr. Clemens,te I make solemn oath that I never took even so much as a straw; I swear that I—”

“Yeste—but that is not tote the purpose. And it is not important. Quite aside from that, you were guilty,—byte your own admission five minutes ago—teof a crime which can send you to State prison for ten years.”

“Who? I?”

“You.”

“What was it?”

“House-breaking. You entered by unlawful means. You destroyed the safeguardte of the laundry door.”

He was quaking all over, now, and his breath waste coming and going in gasps.

“Mr. Clemens,te is that a penitentiary offence? Oh, take it back, take it back! Don’t say it!”

“But I must. It is only the truth.”

He dropped his elbows on the table, and his head in his hands, and moaned and grieved. Presently, all of a sudden he looked up and set his eyes on mine with such a fierce light in them that it gave me a start.

“Thiste is a game!” he shouted, and brought his fist down on the table with a crash. “It’s a game that you’ve put up on me; that’s what it is—a game to forcete me to marry that lying baggage. I see it all. Now deny it if you can!”

“I am not denying it. It is a game; and I am playing this end of it.”

“You mean you have played it. And you’ve lost, too. I’ll never marry that girl—no, not if I live a thousand years! Now, then, what are you going to do about it!”te

“You will be a married man inside of an hour. Or—”te

“Or what?” he scoffed.

“Go to jail. Take your choice.”te

That warmed up his scorn. He rose, took his hat, and made a fine and rather elaborate bow, and said—

“I wish you a very good evening, sir.te When you start out another time to play a game, you want to look at your cards, first, and see how much they are worth. And next time you start in to scare a man, you want to select better. Pleasant evening, to you, dear sir.te Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. Pleasant evening. Allow me—I will touch the bell. You will find a policeman down stairs who will help you out.”

I put my finger on the button, and waited. The color went out of the young fellow’s face, and he said, with a rather dubious attempt at bluster—

“That don’t scare, either.”

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He hesitated, then his confidence forsook him, and he said—

“No. Wait.” He came and sat down. He mused a moment or two, then said, “Mr.te Clemens,te I put it tote you on your honor: is there an officer down there?”

“There is. Your time is short.te Look at the clock. It is five minutes to ten. You may have the lacking five to make up your mind in. At ten you marry, or go to jail.”te

It was time to walk the floor again. Any person in his circumstances would know that. He got up and did it. Sometimes moaning, sometimes swearing; always trying to find some way out of his bitter toils, and not succeeding. At last I put my finger on the button, and began to count, solemnly—

“One—two—three—”te

“Damn her eyes, I’ll marry her! Oh, it’s awful—awful. But I’vete got to do it, and I will. I’ll marry her next winter, I give you my word.”

“Why not now?”

“Nowte? I reckon youte are forgetting one or two details?”

“Which ones?”

“License—preacher—tewitnesses—and so onte.”

“Oh, you think so! Tom! Alice!” They entered. I touched the bellte—three times, then once—to fetch the others. Thete whole gang burst in on the instant, policeman and allte; they had been listening at the keyhole.te

Alice waste dressed to kill; so were her mates. The Reverend Tom was melted away to half his size, and had hardly strength enough to get about. It must have been a frightful twote hourste in that little blistering bath-roomte for a fat man like that. In my time I have seen millions of astonished carpenters,te but not all of them put together werete as astonished as our bridegroom. It knocked him groggy; and he waste a married man before he knew what he was about. Atte the preacher’s suggestion he kissed the bride—it didn’t seem to taste over-good to him—teand said to me, with a sigh—

“It’s your game, sir.te What a hand you held!”

Then they all cleared for the dining room below and the refreshments, and Tom and I sat down, I to smoke and he to fan; and we talked the whole grand thing over, and werete very, very happy and content. And he put his hand in blessing on my head, and said, with tears in his voice—

“Mark,te dear boy, you will be forgiven many a sin for the noblete deed you have done this night.”

I was touched, myself.

Justte then George staggered in, looking stunnedte and weak, and said—

“That Wapping Alice—blame her skin, she’s a man!”

And so it turned out. She explained that it had never occurred to her to make that dire charge against poor Bjorgensen till I complained that the outcome of the original episode wasn’t theatrical enough. She thought she could mend that defect. Well, her effort wasn’t bad—you see it, yourself.te I keep calling her shete—I can’t help it; I mean he.

The couple never lived together, nor had any family.te

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Mr. Clemens removes the fictions from the “Wapping Alice” tale and tells the facts; also recalls his meeting with Alice and the Swede three years afterwards. The Thaw trial drawing to a close; part of Mr. Delmas’s speech in summing up
the case for the defencete.

I am aware that yesterday’s dictation reads like a farcical fairy-tale and looks like an invention; but never mind how it reads or how it looks, it is neither a fairy-tale nor an invention. There is not an essential detail in it that is fictitious. There is one considerable detail which is fictitious, but it is a nonessentialte. In that instance I diverged from fact to fiction merely because I wantedte to publish the thing in a magazinean presently, and for delicacy’s sake I was obliged to make the change. But this Autobiography of mine can stand plainnesses of statement which might make a magazine shiver; it has stood a good many already, and will have to stand a good many more before I get through. For my own pleasure, I wish to remove that fictive detail now, and replace it with the fact. This considerable but not essential fact was this, to wit: Wapping Alice was a womante, not a man. This truth does not relieve or modify by even a shade the splendid ridiculousness of the situation, but the temporary transformation of Alice into a mante does soften the little drama sufficiently to enable me to exploit it in a magazine without risk of overshocking the magazine’s readers.

What actually occurred was,te that when Alice stood before me sobbing, and emptied herself of her embarrassing evidence, she told me that by persuasion of the Swede’s damnable fascinations she had “fallen;”te that her time was approaching, and that she should presently become a mother. She said she had implored the young Swede to marry her and save her from disgrace, but that he had refused. It never occurred to me to doubt her story; nothing occurred to me but to fire up and boil with indignation, which I did. She played her part well; in fact she played it to perfection. I was not only immeasurably angry, but was saturated with evil joy, for I knew that I held all the cards and could make a most satisfactorily miserable man out of that Swede. So I told Alice to get ready for the wedding. Then I dismissed her and called George, and we laid the plans, detail by detail, as already described. In the evening, when I had the poor Swede in my trap,te and he was raging up and down the room and trying to imagine some way to get out of those dreadful toils, I tried to interest him in that impending child. I made a moving appeal to his parental instincts and to his duty toward that blameless little creature, but it only raised his fury a couple of thousand degrees higher than it was before. He said he would allow no man’s bastards to be foisted upon him, and said that if I were in his place I could see how cruel it was to insist upon such an outrage.

The marriage came off, with all its theatrical accompaniments, precisely as already described, and the couple, and the servants, and the policeman, retired to the dining roomte below to feast and rejoice; then the clergyman put his hand on my head and in a

[begin page 40]

The family did not return to Hartford that summer, nor the next, nor the next. I suppose we were in Europe, but I do not remember. However, in the third of these summers we were again in Elmira, New Yorkte, and I went to Hartford on a flying trip to see how George and the other servants were getting along. I remained several days.te On a bright Sunday afternoon I was walking leisurely down the flagged walk toward the upper gate, when I saw a carriage stop in the street; next I noticed that there was a lady and a gentleman in it, and that they were looking intently and apparently expectantly toward me. The carriage was an open one—a fine new Brewster; the horses were coal black and shiny and proud; the occupants of the carriage were finely and fashionably dressedte and gloved, and the gentleman had on his head a silk hat which was as shiny as the coats of the horses. I quickened my pace, and when I got to the carriage the gentleman lifted his hat, the lady bowed and smiled; then, after a moment, recognition burst upon me—these splendidte birds were Alice and the Swede!te The Swede’s face broke into smiles of a glad and happy sort, and he said—

“Mr. Clemens, when you made me marry Alice that time three years ago I could have killed you, but I want to thank you now!te it was the greatest favor anybody ever did me. I hadn’t a cent; I hadn’t any work; I hadn’t a friend, and I couldn’t see anything in front of me but the poor housete. Well, Alice is the girl that has changed all that; she saved me, and I thank you again. She got work for me, all I could do, from Garvie and Hills, the contractors who built your housean; she started a little restaurant down in Main streette, and got Mr. Bunce and Mr. Robinson and Generalte Hawley and Mr. George Warneran, and all your other influential friends who had known her in your house, to come and try her bill of fare. They liked it, and brought everybody else, and pretty soon she had all the custom she could attend to, and was making money like a mint, and it’s still going on yet. She took me out of wage-workte and made a contractor and builder out of me, and that is what I am now, and prospering. This is our turnout; these are our clothes, and they are paid for. We owe it all to you, Mr. Clemens, and your arbitrary and mistaken notions of justice, for if you hadn’t forced me to marry Alice or pack up andte go to the penitentiary it never would have happened.” He paused; then he added, without any bitterness in his tone, “But as to that child, it hasn’t ever arrived, and there wasn’t the damnedestte least prospect of it the time that she told you that fairy-tale—and never had been!”te

Then he laughed, and Alice laughed, and, naturally, I did the same. Then we parted.

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The tremendous Thaw trial is approaching its end. Mr. Delmas delivered a part of his argument for the defencete yesterday. I append an extract from itan.

[begin page 43]

Items from the Children’s Record: Susy’s quaint sayings; Clara’s innumerable damp-nurses, and description of Maria McManus, one of these nurses.

Many months ago I extractedte a chapter from the old manuscript-book which we call the Children’s Recordan—a book in which Mrs. Clemens and I rather desultorily set down remarks made by the children when they were little. We were accustomed to make the entries in the book while the sayings were fresh, wherefore the Record reads like a diary, and not like bygone history. When I extractedte that chapter I observed that the Record has now attained to a value which we had not foreseen in those early days—not a value to persons outside the family, perhaps, but a value to me, because the thoughtless remarks of those innocent babblers, in which their tempers and characterste were revealed, turned out to bete such an accurate forecast of what their characters were to be when they should be grown-ups. I wish to quote from the Record again. When Susy was something over three years old, her religious activities began to develop rapidly. Many of her remarks took color from this interest. Instances:

It was reverently said, though it does not sound so at this distant day.

[begin page 44]

[begin page 45]

Out of idle curiosity, I once made a search of her room to see if there was anything interesting in it. Between her mattresses I found apples, pears, oranges—and the other fruit of the season—and enough of my cigars, smoking-tobacco, and beer, to start a shop with. Another would have reproached her, but I didn’t; I only admired her provident care of herself; I believed I would be just as thoughtful if I were a wet-nurse myself. A couple of years after Clara was done with her, in Hartford, she applied for a place as wet-nurse in an Institution in New York, and gave me as a referencean. The President wrote and asked me if this was correct. I said it was, and gave her reference enough to elect the eleven thousand Virgins of Colognean, if they had been in Maria’s line of business. I said, give her all the beer and whisky and brandy and tobacco and green fruit and lemon-pie she might want, and turn her loose on the nursery, and have no solicitude about the results.

More items from the Record: Susy and Mr. Millet—Mr. Clemens speaks of Millet: his beautiful character, his service as war correspondent, his marriage, his painting the first oil portrait of Mr. Clemens, etc.—Items from the Record, ending with Susy’s letter to Mr. Millet.

Millet’s hair was black then; it isn’t now. My head was brown then; it is white now. Millet was unknown then; he is widely known now. Neither of us was acquainted with trouble then; we are familiar with it now. We were so young then!te we are so old now. Millet was the dearest and most lovable human being of his sex anywhere to be found in that old day. He holds that beautiful supremacy yet, and can maintain it against all comers; age has not soured him; the sweetness that was born in him was born to stay. He has always had troops of affectionate friends; he still has troops of them, and not in America alone, but in England and in France. I don’t suppose he knows what an enemy is; I cannot conceive of his knowing how to acquire an enemy.

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When the war was over he returned to Paris, resumed his painting, and got married. We were at the weddingan and added our share to the display of wedding presents. I contributed a stick of fire-wood decorated with pretty ribbons, and of course it ranked as jewelry, as any one will know who had to pay for wood fires in the French capital in those days.

Millet’s business ability exploited itself again at the World’s Exposition in Chicago in honor of Christopher Columbus, in 1893. The decorating of the White City was placed in his hands; he had a great company of artists of repute under himan; he ordered everything, superintended everything, finished his great work on time, did it thoroughly well, and kept peace in his art-family all the way through. The executive capacity which he displayed brought him an abundance of compliments; among others, he was offered, at a great salary, the chief managership of the largest and wealthiest coal business in Chicago; but he preferred his art to riches,te and declined thatte and other fine offers of the kind.

When Millet came to Hartford to paint the first oil portrait that was ever made of me, he gave me a small picture—a Dutch interior, which was his earliest effort in oils, and I have it yet. At our first sitting he dashed off a charcoal outline of me on his canvas which was so good and strong and lifelike that Mrs. Clemens wouldn’t allow him to add any paint, lest he damage it. She bought it. He had brought but the one canvas from Boston, so he had to go down town and get another. I remained outside on the sidewalk while he went into the art shop to stretch the canvas on the frame. It was dull out there, and I tried to think of some way to put in the time usefully. I was successful. There was a barber shop near-byte, and I went in there to get the ends of my hair clipped off; I fell into a reverie, and when I woke up there was a bushel of brown hair on the floor and none on

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One day at dinner Millet told a charming little story. On a bleak and sleety day two men were drifting here and there over an old and neglected cemetery, and evidently seeking something. Sometimes they were wide apart, sometimes they crossed each other’s path, and at last they spoke. One said:

“You do not seem to succeed.”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“Whom do you seek?”

“The dearest soul, the sweetest nature, the lovingest friend and the faithfulest, a man ever had. And you?”

“I am seeking the hatefulest scoundrel the human race has ever produced; I want to curse his ashes.”

They separated, and searched again far and wide; at last they came together, and together they scraped the moss from a gravestone and revealed the inscription: both had been seeking the same man!

Of course the moral of the story is that there is a good side and a bad side to most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition you will bring out one of them and the other will remainte a sealed book to you. Millet had painted himself without knowing it. He is not capable of bringing out the bad side of anybody. He would bring out the good and lovable side every time, and never find out that there was any other.

As little as Susy was, she was a diligent reader, and in at least one particular she was like the rest of the human race, grown-ups and all; that is to say, she was likely to take the color of the latest book she had read and whose style she had admired. As a result of

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The next paragraph in the Record is of date—

She refers to the little picture already mentioned, which was Millet’s first effort with the brush, and contains an old-fashioned stand-up-in-the-cornerte clock.

In the morning paper I have once more come across that phrase which—considering its awful meaning—I think is the blackest one that exists in any languagean. It always

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President of the United States. You have desired to consult me upon a matter which you conceive to be of national importance. Be seated. Proceed.

Ignorant Citizen. It is indeed a matter which deeply concerns the nation, your Excellency,te and this emboldens me to lay it beforete the head of the people, the source of justice and power, the protector of the weak. I am ignorant, I find myself perplexed, I stand in need of guidance. In this, my situation and the nation’s is the same. I will state my case. In the family of a neighbor of mine there is a lad of sixteen for whom I have a warm affection, and he has the like feeling for me. I have long desired to kill him, and—

Pr. What!

I.C. I have long desired to kill him, but—

Pr. Man, you are not in your right mind!

I.C. Bear with me, your Excellency; hear me patiently, and you will presently cease to doubt my sanity. I can convince you of this without difficulty, sir, if you will but listen to what I have to tell, and give it a kindly and unprejudiced hearing.

Pr. It is so strange, so amazing, that—very well, go on, it promises to be interesting, at any rate.

I.C. Thank you sir. Like some other men, I am so constituted, by nature, that the desire to do murder is in certain circumstances a passion with me, and is not resistible whente I can do it with safety to myself. As I have already said, sir, I have long desired to kill this boy. For many months he was unwilling. And so—

Pr. Unwilling? Do you mean to say that you asked him to let you take his life?

I.C. I used importunities and persuasions to that end, and bought things for him such as boys like, and took him to shows and picnics and such things, but often when he might have consented, his mother’s tears and agonies and supplications turned the scale in her favor and he refused. She is a widow, and he is her only child, and she has often begged me on her knees to be merciful and spare him, and not break her heart. It is the way with mothers, it is natural, and I do not find fault, but they make it difficult. However, sir, to be brief, I at last got his consent, and all was well, and I was happy: I only needed to wait a little while, until he should be sixteen.

Pr. It is a noble forbearance, indeed! Why should you wait?

I.C. Ah, your Excellency iste aware that if I should kill him before he reached the age of consent it would put me in danger, for the law could punish me for it, since his consent to be murdered, if granted before the age of sixteenan would not be valid and therefore would not sufficiently protect me. But I am in great trouble, great perplexity; for now that he is sixteen and willing, I am told by a lawyer that there is no such thing as an “age

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Pr. This is an amazing business! It is inconceivable that a sane person can calmly entertain so atrocious an idea as thatte in a Christian land, a civilized land, an enlightened land, ate citizen could give awayte his life to a murderer at any age between cradle and grave and the murderer go unhanged because of that consent! An “age of consent” for murder? Cannot you see that the idea is preposterous? Youte were going to convince me that you are in your right mind; you have convinced me that you are insane.

I.C. But I have not finished, your Excellency. What I have been telling you is fancy, imagination, fable; I will now tell you a thing which is true. Suppose I should kill, after calculated deliberation,te a lad of seventeen, either with his consent or without it—what would happen? I should be hanged for it, and all would say I got my just deserts. The lad’s family would be steeped in grief—but only in grief—there would be no disgrace. Time would heal their sorrow. But put the lad out of your mind, sir,te and take the case of a girl—an innocent and trusting child of sixteen, the joy of her family and their idol. Beguiled by the devilish arts of a coward and a villain she consentste and is seduced. She is deserted, she is disgraced, she is forsaken by her friends, she is pointed at, scorned, despised, gossiped about, her life is ruined, and this ruin falls also upon her unoffending family; they are disgraced, and the disgrace is permanent; their hearts are broken, existence is a misery and will so continue through all the heavy years until the refuge of the grave is reached. That poor girl has been murdered! Murdered—teoncete? She has been murdered a million times! And her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters—they also have suffered a thousand deaths. And because that ignorant child of sixteen consented to these innumerable murders—including the destruction of unoffending people over whose lives she could have no sort of authority—that master-idiot the law, holdste the assassin guiltless and sets him free! Indeed it is not I that am insane, your Excellency, it is the legislature; it is the law-makerste who visit with death the light offence ofte a sole murder, and infamouslyte place the fate of an inexperienced girl and of her family in her irresponsible hands to do as she pleases with; to turn that fate into a very hell, if she shall so choose, while the real criminal, a bowelless scoundrel, is turned loose unpunished to carry desolation and living death to other hearthstones. It is my hope sir, that the ass who invented the “age of consent”—any age of consent between cradle and grave—is with his progenitors in hell, and that the legislatures that are keeping the resulting law in force will follow him soon. Womente are denied the suffrage, your Excellency. If they had it, how long do you think this most infamous of all laws would continue to defile the statute books?

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Taking up the thread of dictation again after a silence of a month or more—Four hundred thousandte words of Autobiography already dictated—The opening of the Actors’ Fund Fair—The trip to the Jamestown Exposition in Mr. Rogers’s yacht—The proposed trip to England on June 8th to receive honorary degree from Oxford University—Copy of poem “To Mark Twain.”

It seems a long time since I have done any dictating; and it really is a long time, though not so long as it seems, perhaps. In March, after a second trip to Bermudaan, I made a pretense of working, but it probably amounted to nothing more than a pretense, substantially. But I am not grieving about it; I am not reproaching myself. If I could have gotten more pleasure, more comfort, more satisfaction, out of dictating autobiography than I could get out of other forms of play, I should have gone on dictating, instead of seeking other forms of amusement. During a stretch of thirty-five years I exercised my pen, in my trade of authorship, in the summertimete and in the summertimete only. I worked three months in the year and amused myself in other ways during the other nine. My average literary output for the thirty-five years was short of seventy thousand words a year; but since I began to dictate, on the 9th of January 1906, I have not limited myself to the summer vacation as a working time but have spread my labors over all the months. Last March, when I went to Bermuda the second time, I estimated that I had dictated four hundred thousand words in the previous thirteen or fourteen months; I recognized that I had put together enough Autobiography, if spread through my existing books, to secure for those books a twenty-eight years’ renewal of copyright lifean, and as that renewal, in the interest of the bread and butter of my daughters,te had been the Autobiography’s main object, I did not care whether I added anything to that Autobiography or not; indeed I rather formally retired from all human industries and set apart the remaining weeks or years of my life to be observed and enjoyed by me as a holiday—the first very real one in a lifetimete of seventy years and upwards. This has a nonsensical sound, for I am not able to disguise from myself the fact that my life for the past thirty-five years and more has really been nothing more nor less than one long holiday, with three months’ scribbling in each year which other people dignified with the great name of “work,”te but which to me was not work at all, but only play, delicious play, and was never a result of compulsion or of the prodding of conscience, but only of a strong desire to entertain myself.

Many things which I have wanted to talk about have happened in the past month or two, but they are ancient history now—let them go. I helped to open the Actors’ Fund Fair on the 6th of this present monthan. We raised seventy-five thousand dollars for the Fund. I went down to Jamestown in Mr. Rogers’s yacht, the Kanawhate, and saw the opening of the World’s Fair therean. Two or three days of fog followed, and Mr. Rogers and all the guests except Mr. Broughtonte and I got tired and went back home by railan, but

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Meantime, I have been invited by Oxford University to receive an honorary degree on the 26th of June, and shall sail on that quest on the 8than. I have made no effort to conceal the fact that I am vain of this distinction. Sometimes they catch an illustrious American who has wandered to the English shores on his own affairs, and Oxford transfigures him with a degree, but I am one of the very few that have beente sent for from over the ocean.

I like compliments, praises, flatteries; I cordially enjoy all such things, and am grieved and disappointed when what I call a “barren mail”te arrives—a mail that hasn’t any compliments in it. I am always trying to find plausible excuses for copying these tributes into this Autobiography, but at cost of a good deal of pain Ite refrain from doing it. However, I mean to break the rule, to-day, for yesterday’s mail brought me from Texas a complimentary poem which is so fine and so sincere—and I hope I may say affectionate—tethat I want it to live, and am not willing to suppress it. It is by a judge on the benchan.

The Oxford degree of Doctor of Letters to be conferred upon Mr. Clemens on June 26th, and some of the other degrees which he has received.

A cablegram arrived from England three weeks ago inviting me to come to Oxford and receive an honorary degree on the 26th of next monthan. Of course I accepted, and without any waste of time. During the past two years I have been saying with great decision that my traveling days were permanently over, and that nothing would ever induce me to cross the ocean again, yet I was not surprised at the alacrity with which I put that resolution behind me when this flattering invitation came. I could have declined an invitation to come over and accept of a London town lot, and I could have done it without any difficulty, but a university degree is a quite different matter; that is a prize which I would go far to get at any time. I take the same childlike delight in a new degree that an Indian takes in a fresh scalp, and I take no more pains to conceal my joy than the Indian does. I remember the time that I found a battered old-time picayune in the road, when I was a boy, and realized that its value was vastly enhanced to me because I had not earned it. I remember the time, ten years later, in Keokuk, that I found a fifty-dollar bill in the streetan, and that the value of that bill also was vastly enhanced to me by the reflection that I had not earned it. I remember the time in San Francisco, after a furtherte interval of eight years, when I had been out of work and out of money for three months, that I found a ten-cent piece in the crossing at the junction of Commercial and Montgomery streetstean, and realized that that dime gave me more joy, because unearned, than a hundred earned dimes could have given me. In my time I have acquired several hundred thousand dollars, but inasmuch as I earned them they have possessed nothing more than their face value to me, and so the details and dates of their capture are dim in my memory, and in many cases have passed from my memory altogether. On the contrary, how eternally and blazingly vivid in my recollection are those three unearned finds which I have mentioned! Now then, to me university degrees are unearned finds, and they bring the joy that belongs with property acquired in that way; and the money-

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Oxford is healing a secret old sore of mine which has been causing me sharp anguish once a year for many, many years. Privately I am quite well aware that for a generation I have been as widely celebrated a literary person as America has ever produced, and I am also privately aware that in my own peculiar line I have stood at the head of my guild during all that time, with none to dispute the place with me; and so it has been an annual pain to me to see our universities confer an aggregate of two hundred and fifty honorary degrees upon persons of small and temporary consequence—persons of local and evanescent notoriety, persons who drift into obscurity and are forgotten inside of ten years—and never a degree offered to me! In these past thirty-five or forty years I have seen our universities distribute nine or ten thousand honorary degrees and overlookte me every time. Of all those thousands, not fifty were known outside of America, and not a hundred are still famous in it. This neglect would have killed a less robust person than I am, but it has not killed me; it has only shortened my life and weakened my constitution; but I shall get my strength back now. Out of those decorated and forgotten thousands not more than ten have been decorated by Oxford, and I am quite well aware—and so is America, and so is the rest of Christendom—that an Oxford decoration is a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university on either side of the ocean, and is worth twenty-five of any other, whether foreign or domestic.

Now then, having purged myself of this thirty-five years’ accumulation of bile and injured pride, I will drop the matter and smooth my feathers down, and talk about something else.

A description of Tuxedo Park; also of the invasion of Mr. Clemens’s house by the first burglar known to the Park.

Tuxedo Park is unique—in America. It is what may be called the American San Marino. Like San Marino, it is set apart in a holy seclusion far from the madding crowd; also like San Marino it is a wee little miniature republic, with an excellent system of government of its own devising. I think that in territory it is about the twin of San Marino.

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There is a village of Tuxedo, and it is not new, but Tuxedo Park is not more than a quarter of a century oldan, and has no connection with the village. Tuxedo Park is ideally situated. It is only an hour from New York City by rail. Coming from New York the train flies through a level of flats and marshes for thirty or forty minutes, then comes suddenly upon a barrier of high and rocky and forest-clad hills, and plunges into the heart of this barrier; it climbs up through a beautiful gorge—the whole of which gorge is a part of the sovereignty of Tuxedo Park—and arrives at Tuxedo village station; thence you drive through a massive and towered granite gateway and enter the sacred ground—that is if the uniformed guards on sentry duty at the gateway are satisfied with your credentials, and are convinced that you are honest, and are on an honest errand; otherwise you will not get in. You ascend gradually, by winding and perfect roads, past fine and widely separated villas and private gardens, and the further you climb the more beautiful are the views that enchant your eyes; you look down upon a pair of lakes framed in the embrace of the lovely hills, upon whose surfaces the clouds and the forests and the scattered villas paint pictures of themselves in the softest and tenderest colors.

The whole population of the State is concentrated upon the hillsides around and about these lakes, and between the first villa of the processional serieste and the furthest one the distance is not more than three miles. The surrounding territory was bought by the corporation, not for use but merely to keep undesirable people out. The whole population of the miniature republic probably does not exceed fifty families, with an average ofte four members and five servants to the family. If you live in Tuxedo Park America takes it for granted that you are rich, it not being regarded as possible for a moderate income to survive there.

It is a pleasant place to live in; substantially the population is a club; it has a large and well conducted club housete, and all the families are entitled to its privileges by right of residence. However, this right has a limit, in the case of a newcomer; if he rents, or buys, or builds, a house, he is a member of the club during that year without an election; but the community will take a vote upon him when the year is out, and if he has provente unsatisfactory they blackball him and close the club against him; he finds himself isolated and uncomfortable, and presently removes to some other place. In the course of the years eighteen newcomers have been blackballed, and have retired from the Park.

The Park’s neatly uniformed policemen are on duty along the Park roads night and day, but as it is claimed that no tramp or burglar, or peddler, or beggar, or gambler, or improper lady, or any other undesirable person, can get by the guards at the granite gateway, the police have nothing to do but walk around and keep awake. It is held that locks and bolts and window-catches are not needed in the Park, and that you need not be afraid to let your doors and windows stand open night and day. If noises disturb you you telephone Captain Bushan, and he squelches them. No noise has interrupted the dead

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Apparently this is my season for high distinctions: Oxford the other day, and now a burglar—the first burglar that has ever been heard of in Tuxedo Park since the beginning of its existence. He entered the house at one o’clock this morning, and went all over it at his leisure, examining every room in it, at his leisure, by the light of a candle, and marking his route everywhere with candle drippings. He was in every room but mine; my bath-roomte door was wide open, and he stood in it and dripped candle-grease, but he came no further, or if he did, he dripped no grease; there were bank-bills on my night table, and a handful of silver; he did not touch them. At half pastte one he entered the cook’s room, and she rose up and asked him what he wanted; he did not answer, but fled. I could have told her you can’t get information out of a burglar by asking for it. I have had experience of burglars, and know all about them, but the cook is young and inexperienced; she called to Nellie, one of the maids, and that fetched both maids; they heard the burglar running, and heard him leave the house by the front door; three hours and a half later they got up in a body and examined the house all over, finding candle drippingste everywhere, but not an asset missing—not a thing missing except three rolls which were to have been my breakfast, and whose loss reduced me to corn bread for that meal.te At five o’clock I got up to fill a pipe, and I saw a policeman passing by my part of the house. The front door was standing wide open, but he probably attached no significance to that, as it is religion and tradition, here, that there are no burglars, and that a door is doing just as well when it is open as when it is closed. He gave the open door no attention, but passed by, like the Gentile, on the other side—if it was the Gentile; I think it was the Gentile; anyway I know it was either the Gentile or the Shunammitete, or the good Samaritanan; I am rusty in these things, but it is no matter; he passed by not on the other side, but on our side. It was a few minutes afterward that the servants examined the house. They found an extinguished candle on the floor close to the threshold of the open door; they found my overcoat-closette standing open and candle drippings on its floor, but no overcoats gone; they found the row of pictures on the staircase wall twisted askew—suggesting that the burglar was drunk, because a sober man would find plenty of room without crowding the pictures—and they found nothing missing except those three rolls. Now then, I come to something which hurts my feelings. On the table in the front hall were two boxes of my cigars—cost four cents apiece;te one of them stood open, and six cigars of the top row were gone. When the three girls invaded my room at a quarter to six, with their great news of the burglary, and assured me that not a single asset was gone except the three rolls and six cigars, I felt a mingled thrill of gratitude and pride, for at last I seemed to have found somebody magnanimous enough to be willing

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We telephoned for Captain Bush, and he came and made a thorough examination; then reported to me. He said that that burglar was evidently an amateur, not a professional; also, it was his belief that this visitor was not a burglar at all, and had never intended to steal anything, but was some one who had a grudge against the owner of this house and made his visit merely out of revenge. Captain Bush had an idea that this amateur was most probably some former manservant who had been discharged by the owner of this house. I didn’t say anything, but I had a quite different idea about the matter, and I have it yet. I think that my visitor was some young society gentleman; that his elaborate visitation was a joke, and that his purpose was to put a sarcasm upon the police and the community, a satire upon the Park’s vaunted immunity from the visits of tramps and burglars. I think he will consider that his joke was successful beyond his utmost hopes, when he learns that the guardian of the night went by the wide open door at five in the morning and did not see it. Privately, I expect to get those missing rolls back, with a courteous letter of explanation.

Jim Gillis’s death—Mr. Clemens pictures him as he knew him years ago in Jackass Gulch—The episodes of the boiling and tasting of the wild fruit, and the challenging of the impertinent stranger to fight a duel for having criticised Jim Gillis’s clothing.

Through Mr. Paine I learn that Jim Gillis is dead. He died aged seventy-seven,te inte California, about two weeks ago, after a long illness. Mr. Paine went with Mr. Goodman to see himan, but Jim was too ill to see any one. Steve Gillis’s end is also near at hand, and he lies cheerfully and tranquilly waiting. He is up in the sylvan Jackass Gulch countryan, among the other Gillises whom I knew so well something more than forty years ago—George and Billy, brothers of Steve and Jim. Steve and George and Billy have large crops of grandchildrenan, but Jim remained a bachelor to the end.

I think Jim Gillis was a much more remarkable person than his family and his intimates ever suspected. He had a bright and smart imagination, and it was of the kind that turns out impromptu work and does it well; does itte with easy facility, andte without previous preparation; justte builds a story as it goes along, careless of whither it is proceeding, enjoying each fresh fancy as it flashes from the brain and caring not at all whether the story shall ever end brilliantly and satisfactorily or shan’tte end at all. Jim was born a humorist, and a very competent one. When I remember how felicitous were his untrained efforts, I feel a conviction that he would have been a star performer if he had been discovered, and had been subjected to a few years of training with a pen. A genius

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I spent three months in the log cabinte home of Jim Gillis and his “pard,”te Dick Stokeran, in Jackass Gulch, that serene and reposeful and dreamy and delicious sylvan paradise of which I have already spokenan. Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy-tale, an extravagant romance—tewith Dick Stoker as the hero of it,te as a general thing. Jim always soberlyte pretended that what he was relating was strictly history—veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a gentlete serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest. In one of my books—“Huckleberry Finn,” I think—I have used one of Jim’s impromptu tales, which hete called “The Tragedy of the Burning Shame.” I had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. As Jim told it—inventing it as he went along—I think it was one of the most outrageously funny things I have ever listened to. How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable forman! I used another of Jim’s impromptus in a book of mine called “The Tramp Abroad,” a tale of how the poor innocent and ignorant woodpeckers tried to fill up a house with acornsan. It is a charming story, a delightful story, and full of happy fancies. Jim stood before the fire and reeled it off with the easiest facility, inventing its details as he went along, and claiming, as usual,

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Once or twice Jim’s energetic imagination got him into trouble. A squaw came along one day and tried to sell us some wild fruit that looked like large green gages. Dick Stoker had lived in that cabin eighteen years, and knew that that product was worthless and inedible; but heedlessly, and without purpose, he remarked that he had never heard of it before. That was enough for Jim. He launched out with fervent praises of that devilish fruit, and the more he talked about it the warmer and stronger his admiration of it grew. He said that he had eaten it a thousand times; that all one needed to do was to boil it with a little sugar and there was nothing on the American continent that could compare with it for deliciousness. He was only talking to hear himself talk;te and so he was brought up standing, and for just one moment, or maybe two moments, smittente dumb, when Dick interrupted him with the remark thatte if the fruit was so delicious why didn’t he invest in it on the spot? Jim was caught, but he wouldn’t let on; he had gotten himself into a scrape, but he was not the man to back down or confess; he pretended that he was only too happy to have this chance to enjoy once more this precious gift of God. Oh, he was a loyal man to his statements! I think he would have eaten that fruit if he had known it would kill him. Hete bought the lot, and said airily and complacentlyte that he was glad enough to have that benefaction, and that if Dick and I didn’t want to enjoy it with him we could let it alone—he didn’t care.

Then there followed a couple of the most delightful hours I have ever spent. Jim took an empty kerosene can of about a three-gallon capacity and put it on the fire and filled it half full of water, and dumped into it a dozen of those devilish fruits,te and as soon as the water came to a good boil he added a handful of brown sugar; as the boiling went on he tested the odious messte from time to time; the unholy vegetableste grew softer and softer, pulpier and pulpier, and now he began to make tests with a tablespoon. He would dip out a spoonful and taste it, smack his lips with fictitious satisfaction, remark that perhaps it needed a little more sugar—so he would dump in a handful and let the boiling go on a while longer; handful after handful of sugar went in, and still the tasting went on for two hours, Stoker and I laughing at him, ridiculing him, deriding him, blackguarding him all the while, and he retaining his serenity unruffled. At last he said the manufacture had reached the right stage, the stage of perfection. He dipped his spoon, tasted, smacked his lips, and broke into enthusiasms of grateful joy;te then he gave us a taste apiece. From all that we could discover,te those tons of sugar had not affected that fruit’s malignant sharpness in the least degree. Acid? It was all acid, vindictive acid, uncompromising acid, with not a trace of the modifying sweetness which the sugar ought to have communicated to it and would have communicated to it if that fruit had been invented anywhere outside of perdition. We stopped with that one taste, but that great-hearted Jim, that dauntless martyr, went on sipping and sipping, and sipping, and praising and praising, and praising, and praising, until his teeth and tongue were raw, and Stoker and I nearly

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About once a year he would come down to San Francisco, discard his rough mining costume, buy a fifteen-dollar suit of ready-made slops, and stride up and down Montgomery streette with his hat tipped over one ear and looking as satisfied as a king. The sarcastic stares which the drifting stream of elegantte fashion cast upon him did not trouble him; he seemed quite unaware. On one of these occasions Joe Goodman and I and one or two other intimates took Jim up into the Bank Exchange billiard roomte. It was the resort of the rich and fashionable young swells of San Francisco. The time was ten at night, and the twenty tables were all in service, all occupied. We strolled up and down the place to let Jim have a full opportunity to contemplate and enjoy this notable feature of the city.te Every now and then a fashionable young buck dropped a sarcastic remark about Jim and his clothes. We heard these remarks, but hoped that Jim’s large satisfaction with himself would prevent his discovering that he was the object of them; but that hope failed; Jim presently began to take notice; then he began to try to catch one of these men in the act of making his remark. He presently succeeded. A large and handsomely dressed young gentlemante was the utterer. Jim stepped toward him and came to a standstill,te with his chin liftedte and histe haughty pride exhibiting itself in his attitude and bearing, andte said, impressively—

“That was for me. You must apologize, or fight.”

Half a dozen of the neighboring players heard him say it, and they faced about and rested the butts of their cues on the floor and waited with amused interest for results. Jim’s victim laughed ironically, and said—

“Oh, is that so? What would happen if I declined?”

“You will get a flogging that will mend your manners.”

“Oh indeed! I wonder if that’s so.”

Jim’s manner remained grave and unruffled. He said—

“I challenge you. You must fight me.”

“Oh really! Will you be so good as to name the time?”

“Nowte.”

“How prompt we are!te Place?”

“Herete.”

“This is charming! Weapons?”

“Double-barreled shotguns loaded with slugs; distance,te thirty feet.”

It was high time to interfere. Goodman took the young fool aside and said—

“You don’t know your man, and you are doing a most dangerous thing. You seem to think he is joking, but he is not joking, he is not that kind; he’s in earnest; if you decline the duel he will kill you where you stand; you must accept his terms, and you must do it right away, for you have no time to waste; take the duel or apologize. You will apologize

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The man apologized, repeating the words as they fell from Jim’s lips—the crowd massed around the pair and listening—and the character of the apology was in strict accordance with Goodman’s prediction concerning it.

I mourn for Jim. He was a good and steadfast friend, a manly one, a generous one; an honest and honorable man and endowed with a lovable nature. He instituted no quarrels himself, but whenever a quarrel was put upon him he was on deck and ready.

Copy of letter from California lawyer regarding Jim Gillis—Roosevelt’s attack upon Dr. Long, the naturalist, and newspaper clippings regarding it.

A letter has arrived from a lawyer resident in Sonora, California, which gratifies me because it speaks well of Jim Gillis, and because it proves to me that Jim remained, to the end, the same Jim whom I last looked upon thirty-nine years ago. I will insert it here.

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The President is badly worsted in the scrap, and I think he is wise in backing out of it. There was no respectable way out, and I think it was plainly best for him to accept and confess defeat, in silence. And he would be safe in any course he might pursue, whatever that course might be, for the newspapers would praise it, and admire it, and the nation would applaud. It is long since the head of any nation has been so blindly and unreasoningly worshiped as is President Roosevelt by this nation to-day. If he should die now, he would be mourned as no ruler has been mourned save Nero.

I wish to copy here a part of this pitiable fight, of the dates May 22 and May 28, and I wish I could be here fifty years hence and listen while some sane person should read these notes, and get him to tell me how they impress him. I feel quite sure that in that day the mention of Theodore’s name willte excite laughter—laughter at the eighty millions as well as at himself.

More about the Roosevelt-Long natural-history controversy; and Mr. Clemens’s story of the turkey-gobbler that hatched out a doll’s tea-set from a porcelain egg—The curious incident which happened to Mr. and Mrs. Clemens in Vienna, when they were detained in the Countess’s house by the porter.

I think it is not wise for an emperor, or a king, or a president, to come down into the boxing-ring, so to speak, and lower the dignity of histe office by meddling in the small affairs of private citizens. I think it is not even discreet in a private citizen to come out in public and make a large noise, and by criticism and fault-finding try to cough down and injure another citizen whose trade he knowste nothing valuable aboutan. It seems to me that natural history is a pretty poor thing to squabble about anyway, because it is not an exact science. What we know about it is built out of the careful or careless observations of students of animal nature, and no man can be accurate enough in his observations to safely pose as the last and unassailable authority in the matter—not even Aristotle, not even Plinyan, not even Sir John Mandevillean, not even Jonah, not even Theodore Roosevelt. All these professionals ought to stand ready to accept each other’s facts, closing one eye furtively now and then, perhaps, but keeping strictly quiet and saying nothing. The professional who disputes another professional’s facts damages the business and imperils his own statistics, there being no statistics connected with the business that are absolute and unassailable. The only wise and safe course is for all the naturalists to stand by each other and accept and endorse every discovery, or seeming discovery, that any one of them makes. Mr. Roosevelt is immeasurably indiscreet. He accepts as an established fact that the ravens fed Elijahan; it is then bad policy in him to question the surgical ability of Mr. Long’s bird. I accept the raven’s work, and admire it. I know the raven; I know him well; I know he has no disposition to share his food, inferior and overdue as it is, with prophets or presidents, or any one else—yet I feel that it would not be right nor judicious in me to question the validity of the hospitalities of those ravens while trying to market natural-history marvels of my own which are of a similar magnitude. I know of a turkey-hen that tried during several weeks to hatch out a porcelain egg, thente the gobbler took the job and sat on that egg two entire summers and at last hatched it. He hatched out of it a doll’s tea-set of fourteen pieces, and all perfect,

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Something has brought to my mind a curious incident of our sojourn in Vienna, nine years ago. I lectured for one of the great charities one afternoon. At the front, in the seats of honor, sat several young members of the imperial familyan, and with them a grand duchess whose married title was the Countesste di Bardian. When I had finished my instructions Mrs. Clemens and I were introduced to this lady by a valued friend of ours whom I have already mentioned once or twice in this Autobiography, Madame Laszowskate, wife of a lieutenant generaltean. A pleasant conversation in English followed, lasting perhaps a quarter of an hour, then we parted. We met the Lieutenant Generalinte again that evening and asked her if we were under any responsibilities and obligationste imposed by court etiquette. She said, yes, but that they were quite simple and unburdensome: we must call about noon next day, write our names in the Countess’s visiting-book, which we would find in a small office on the ground floor—that was all; then we could go peaceably about our business.

The Countess was sojourning at the time in the palace of another grand duchess of the imperial familyan. At noon next day we drove thither in a cab. We did not drive in, but stopped at the sidewalk abreast of the lofty arched doorway, and got out. A couple of soldiers with their muskets stood rigid and erect guarding that imposing entrance, with their backs against the masonry; also there was another guardian—the usual huge porter who in Vienna serves princes and such, and who is clothed from chapeau to heel in military splendors and bears a tall staff of office like that one which the drum-major of a regiment carries in front of the band. He approached us, bowing in the courtliest way, and conducted us through the great doorway, and was going to march us still further, but Mrs. Clemens was alarmed, and spoke to him. We had gone by the little office where our errand lay, and she explained, and said we merely wanted to write our names in the visitor’s book;te but the porter most politely informed her that we were expected up stairste, and he tried to march us forward again. But Mrs. Clemens assured him that that could not be so, and almost begged him to let us do our modest errand and go away. But he insisted thatte we were expected; addingte that he had his orders, that it was his duty to produce us up stairste, and that he must do it. Mrs. Clemens was getting badly worried,

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“But madam, you are Americans?”

“Yes,” my wife replied.

“Then there is no mistake, madam. The Countess expects you. She commanded me to deliver you up stairste, and beg you to wait for her, saying she was obliged to go out but would be back very soon.”

Mrs. Clemens pleaded again, and said there was unquestionably a mistake, and added—

“It is not us, it is some other Americans.”

But the vast creature was immovable; he had had his orders; it was his business to produce two Americans; he had got them, and evidently he was not going to trade Americans in the hand for Americans in the bush, and risk getting into trouble by it; all he needed was Americans; he had them, and evidently he was not going to take any chances. He moved forward, blazing the way with polite bows, and we followed, of course, realizing that his bulk and his two soldiers were arguments which had to be respected. At the foot of a grand staircase he delivered us into the custody of some powdered and silk-and-satinte and yellow-velveted footmen who were distributed along up and down the stairs, then made his bow and went back to his post to see if he could catch some more unprotected stragglers.te

Do you know that expression,te “what larks!”tean It describes what I was feeling as we climbed the stairs. No fine and high and noble act that I could have done could have given me so much pleasure, so much joy, so much frivolous delight, as I was getting out of this accidental and unstudied circumventing of those other Americans, who had done me no harm and had not earned the frosty reception they would get from the big porter when they should presently arrive. I imagined that spectacle and enlarged it, and inflated it, and put into it every detail that could make it charming and spectacular, even to getting them shot by the sentries. I wished I could havete a sight of it, but of course I couldn’t. Mrs. Clemens’s state of mind was very different from mine; she was distressed and ashamed, and profoundly unhappy. By nature she was refined, and gentle, and kindly, and she could find no pleasure in the thought of the humiliation of those other Americans; moreover, she was distressed on her own account, and on mine, for she was aware that our situation was not a desirable one, and could presently furnish us considerable discomfort.

We were conducted through two or three great salons on the first floor (or what an American would call the second floor); in the second—or the third, whichever it was—the lackey begged us to be seated, and bowed himself out. Mrs. Clemens sat down and mourned; but the curious adventure had so charged me with happiness that I could not sit—I had to keep moving. The place was a treasure-house of rare and beautiful things, and I sauntered around exclaiming over them and saying,te time and again—

“Look at this, Livy,” and “look at that, Livy,” and “come and see this, Livy, you’ll never find its like again.”

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“How can you be so flippant when we are in such a serious situation? We can’t get out—you know that; we have to stay, there is no help for it; they can come home at any moment and find us here—then what can we say?”

“Why Livy, we don’t have to say anything; it is those other Americans that are in trouble; we are not out of luck; this is the delightfulestte thing that could ever happen; it is just like a play; it couldn’t be arranged better on the stage. You ought to be grateful; this couldn’t happen to you twice in a century; you ought to make the most you can of it now that Providence has thrown itte in our way. Livy, I wouldn’t have missed this romantic adventure for anything; think how unusual it is—how rare, how extraordinary, and how fortunate and charming is our end of it. You ought to mourn for those other Americans; they are the ones that are in hard luck. They will try to get by the big porter; he will head them off; they will plead and beg and rage and storm, and try to flank him, and they can’t succeed, of course; they can’t dodge around a continent like that—it isn’t such an easy matter. He will call the soldiers and they will charge bayonets on those Americans, and right at that crucial moment the grand duchesses will arrive, and at their order the soldiers and the porters will seize those Americans and throw them over their cab into the street. I would give a thousand dollars to see it, if I had it.”

But she said sorrowfully—

“Don’t talk so. It isn’t a trifling matter; it is a serious one, and most distressful. You tellte me to think of those other Americans. I do think of them; I can’t help thinking of them. We are putting shame upon them, a humiliation which they will remember all their lives, and they have not done us any harm, nor meditated any.”

I said—“Oh don’t be troubled, Livy, it is going to come out some way or other—I don’t know just how—but it is going to come out—don’t you fret. This is better than any play on any stage, because it was unpremeditated; it was not invented; it has happened its own self without anybody’s help, and there isn’t a dramatist alive that could improve on it. Try to enjoy it; it was not sent for our sorrow, but for our entertainment, and we ought in gratitude to get the most out of it that we can. If you will stand at that window I’ll stand at this one, and when they throw those Americans out——”

Just then the grand duchesses appeared at the head of the stairs, in the distance, and took up their line of march toward usan. We stood up, respectful in attitude, and waited. As soon as they had arrived within good speaking distance the Countess di Bardi exclaimed in English—

“Oh I am so sorry we had to keep you waiting, Mrs. Clemens;” and the other duchess said the equivalent of it in German.

It seemed too good to be true, and Mrs. Clemens had to reassure herself with the question—

“Was your Highness expecting us?”

“Why yes, we sent a note to your hotel inviting you. Didn’t you get it?”

The explanation was easy—to wit: we had missed the messenger, thereforete we had

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We remained half an hour and had a quite lively time; in fact one might properly describe it as even a jolly time. When we finally proposed to go we were asked to wait a little and see the children, because the children wanted to see us. They presently came, and they proved to be very entertaining and interesting little talkers. The eldest was a little lady of fourteen; the youngest was a handsome little lad of seven years. I felt a mighty respect for that little duke, for he was the son of that widely and justly honored and revered grand duke of the imperial house who had given his life to the study of diseases of the eyean, and whose office doors were always open to the poor whose eyes needed his healing services. He charged nothing, yet his rewards were rich, for they were paid in gratitude.

By all rules we ought to have retired from the presence backward, but the grand duchesses were as kindlyte and as thoughtful in this matter as the Emperorte was to me on a later occasion: they went all the way to the head of the stairs with us, and thus spared us the necessity of attempting a mode of progress which we could not have essayed successfully and to our satisfaction, for lack of practice. After the good-byes one of the grand duchesses said—

“Mr. Clemens,te you will have to wait a moment. This boy has been devouring you with his eyes all the time, and I can see that he has been wanting to ask you a question, out of the deeps of his heart, and has been afraid to utter it. He has whispered it to me, and I have encouraged him to speak it out and not be afraid.”

And so, being thus encouraged, the little duke did speak it out, and eagerly, and with his heart in it. He said—

“Mr. Clemens,te did you ever see a real red Indian?”

I answered, with a justifiable feeling of pride and self-admirationte, that I had seen that kind of an Indian; and as we passed from the presence I saw by the light in that little duke’s eyes that in one person’s regard, at least, I was a hero for once in my life.

Dictated after an interval of sixte weeks—The journey to England on the Minneapoliste; events that transpired on board, and the English welcome by the stevedores.

There has been an interval of six weeks. Originally I had intended to stay in England only ten or twelve days, but circumstances compelled me to add a fortnight to that. I sailed for London in the Minneapoliste on the 8th of June, and took with me as temporary

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We had a lazy, comfortable, homelike, nine-day passage, over smooth seas, with not enough motion in a thousand miles to make a baby sick. The ships of that line are very large and very steady, and most satisfactorily slow and deliberate. They have spacious decks, and every passenger has a deal more room than he needs; they are freight ships, and have accommodation for only a handful of passengers. This one was full, with only a hundred and fifty-four. Fifty-one of them were college girls, withte their protectors,te going out on vacation to study Europe. This was pleasant to me, who am rather abnormally partial to young girls. I took care of the most of these, and did it very well, as everybody conceded. The pick of the flock was a very pretty and very sweet child of seventeen who looked only fourteen, and who seemed only fourteen, and remained only fourteen to me to the end of the voyage. I selected her before we were out of sight of land, and borrowed her from her three elderly aunts and placed her at my side at the captain’s table, and from that time until the end of the voyage she had no occasion to miss her mother—if I do say it myself that shouldn’t. Her name was Carlottaan, but I changed it to Charley, which seemed to me to improve it. She was a gifted and cultivated little creature. On the last night out there was the usual concert in the dining roomte, for the benefit of the Seamen’s Hospital. Charley played a violin solo to admiration, and astonished everybody. She wasn’t much bigger than her fiddle, but she made it talk a moving and majestic language. I made a speech; other excellent people sang songs, and punished the piano. Rev. Dr. Patton, that verbal and intellectual wonder, twenty-five years President of Princeton University, conducted the concert, thente finished his services with a brilliant exhibition of what a university president can do when he turns himself into an auctioneer. There was a jack-legged draughtsmante on board who made some unimaginably poor caricatures of me on six post-cardste; I autographed them, and Rev. Dr. Patton set himself the task of auctioneering off the six for eighty dollars. It furnished him a stubbornte job, but he is not of the easily discouraged kind and he stayed faithfully by his enterprise until he accomplished it. In my talk I departed from the humorousan for a while, and was greatly gratified with the result. I was expecting those people to cry, and they did. Afterward a deputation of ladies visited me on deck, and the spokeswoman said—

“We admired you before, but we love you now.”

I did not suspect that a note was struck then whose gracious music was to continue to fall upon my grateful ears day and night, unceasingly, through all my stay in England. It

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At the end of nine days we reached the dock at Tilburyan, and the hearty and happy and memorable English welcome began. Who began it? The very people of all people in the world whom I would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class—grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! They stood in a body on the dock and charged their masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of me.

A few words about Brown’s Hotel, where Mr. Clemens stopped—His active life in England compared with his former lazy one at home—The many letters, telegrams, etc., to be answered—The numerous calls to be returned—The dinner at Dorchester House, and some of the guests who were present—The Pilgrims’te luncheon, and copy of the London Telegraph account of it.

At the railway station in London we had a moment’s glimpse and a word or two of talk with that brilliant Irishman, Bernard Shaw, who was waiting there to receive his biographer, our fellow voyager, Mr. Hendersonan. I lunched at Mr. Shaw’s house a week or two afterward, and expanded the acquaintanceship. I will speak of that entertaining episode further along. Charley’s parents were waiting at the station for their charming little rascal, and into their hands the aunts and I delivered her.

By letter and cable, before leaving America, we had secured a parlor and two bedrooms in Brown’s Hotel, Dover streette, a placid, drowsy, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned English inn well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort now rare in England and becoming rarer every year. The tourist seeks the Hotel Cecil, the Savoy, and the other vast modern hotels now, and infestste them multitudinously.

We found a great many letters and telegrams awaiting us, and Ashcroft engaged an assistant, and the two began the work of answering them. During the first week they worked from nine in the morning until midnight, but after that they did not have to do very much night work. The messages were from both sexes and of all ages, and there was hardly one whose prevailing note was not affection. One could not read those simple, unstudied, and hearty outpourings and not be moved. I may say with truth that I lived many happy lifetimes in a single week, in those days. Surely such weeks as those must be very rare in this world; I had seen nothing like them before; I shall see nothing approaching them again. I will leave room in this place for a sample or two of those letters and poems, and will decide later whether to insert them or notan.

My habits underwent a sudden and lively change. At home they had been of a lazy sort, for a year or two—to wit: breakfast in bed at eight o’clock, newspapers and the pipe

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As regards public functions, I had accepted two by cable before leaving America, and had declined the others; later the list was augmented by four, but by that time I was fairly broken in and did not mind it. The first of the functions was a dinner at Dorchester House on the 21st of June, the palace inhabited by our Ambassadorte, Whitelaw Reid, and was altogether delightful. There were twenty-five or thirty guests, all men of distinction in literature, art, science, and scholarship, and there were no speeches. We chatted until toward midnight, and even then were tereluctant to break up and go home. I knew all of the guests by reputation, and I had known Abbey, the artist, and Sir Norman Lockyer, the astronomer, and several others, long and intimately. Among the guests were these: Lord Tennyson, Presidentte of the Royal Literary Fund; Sir E. Poynter, Presidentte of the Royal Academy; Sir E. Waterlow, Presidentte of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colors; Sir G. T. Goldie, Presidentte of the Royal Geographical Society; Lord Glenesk, Presidentte of the Newspaper Press Fund; Mr. R. N. Crane, acting chairman of the American Society in London; Sirte G. Reid, ex-Presidentte of the Royal Scottish Academy; Professor Herkomer, R.A.; the Poet Laureate; Lord Macnaghten, treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn; Mr. C. Willis, K.C., treasurer of the Inner Temple; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tademate, R.A., Mr. Sidney Leean, and Mr. H. W. Lucy, of Punchtean.

The next function was set for the 25th. It was a luncheon tendered by the London Society of the Pilgrimsan, and was to have place at the Savoy Hotel and be followed by the conferring of the degrees at Oxford, next day.

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Paragraph copied from “England’s Ovation to Mark Twain” by Sydney Brooks, in regard to Mr. Clemens’s speech at the Pilgrims’ dinner—Speeches can be conveyed in print, but talks cannot—The ceremony of conferring the degree of D. Litt., and copy of Sydney Brooks’s account of it.

The fine verses quoted in that account are from the hand of Owen Seaman, of the Punch editorial staff. It sounds that same deep note of affection, which I so prize.

Inte an article entitled “England’s Ovation to Mark Twain”te Sydney Brookstean has a paragraph which calls to mind a chapter of this Autobiography which I dictated a couple of years ago when Clara made her débuttean on the concert stage at Norfolk, Connecticut, and I made a talk—not a speech. This is the quotation:

It is as I have said in the autobiographical chapter just referred to: speecheste can be conveyed in print, but not talkste. Speeches consist of literarily phrased and completed sentences, and they read smoothly and intelligibly, but this is not the case with talks. The soul of a talk consists of action, not words; action, gesture, inflection—the unvoiced expression of the thought. These felicities escape the stenographer; they are an aroma; he cannot concrete them into words; the words are not there; none but the inconsequential sentences are completed; the happy ones break off in the middle because the audience has got the point, it is not necessary to finish the sentence, and the house would not hear the finish anyhow. But the stenographer cannot leave the sentences in that broken condition, for the result would be ragged, incoherent and incomprehensible; therefore he finishes the broken sentences with words of his own, and the result is stupendously unhappy. A talk cannot be conveyed in print successfully; there is no way to do it, and the attempt should never be made. Oh look at that Pilgrim talk of mine! It was an exceedingly good talk when it was uttered, but how flat it is in print!

I waste in Oxford by seven o’clock that evening (June 25, 1907), andte trying on the scarlet gown which the tailor had been constructing, and found it right—right and surpassingly becoming. At half pastte ten the next morning we assembled at All Souls College and marched thence, gowned, mortar-boarded,te and in double file, down a long street to the Sheldonian Theatre, between solid walls of the populace, very much hurrah’dte and limitlessly kodacked. We made a procession of considerable length and distinction and picturesqueness, with the Chancellor, Lord Curzonan, late Viceroy of India, in his rich robe of black and gold, in the lead, followed by a pair of trim little-boyte train-bearers, and the train-bearers followed by the young Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was to be made a D.C.L. The detachment of D.C.L.’ste were followed by the Doctors of Science, and these by the Doctors of Literature, and these in turn by the Doctorste of Music. Sidney Colvin marched in front of me; I was coupled with Sidney Lee, and Kipling followed us; General Booth, of the Salvation Armyan, was in the squadron of D.C.L.’ste.

Our journey ended, we were halted in a fine old hall whence we could see, through a corridor of some length, the massed audience in the theatre. Here for a little time we moved about and chatted and made acquaintanceships; then the D.C.L.’ste were summoned, and they marched through that corridor and the shouting began in the theatre. It would be some time before the Doctors of Literature and of Science would be called for, because each of those D.C.L.’ste had to have a couple of Latin speeches made over him

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I will now save what is left of my modesty by quoting againte from Sydney Brooks’s “Ovation.”

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A dinner at one of the colleges, at which Mr. Clemens was to respond to a toast. He wears evening dress when he should have worn his scarlet robe—His opinion of dinners and speech-making in general.

There was to be a dinner of high dignity that night at one of the collegesan. I was to occupy a place at the high table with the Chancellor, the heads of colleges, Ambassador Reid, and some other distinguishedte personages, and respond to a toast. I had asked and received permission to stay at home until the banquet should be over and speech-making time at hand. I had been asking and acquiring this privilege in America for six years, and valued it beyond price. A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditch-diggingte. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustainedte misery of mind and body. These sorrows begin with the assembling of the clans half an hour before the dinner. During all that half hour one must stand on his feet with the crowd, amidte a persecuting din of conversation, and must shake hands and exchange banalities and “Ite am so glad to see you sirs”te with apparently seven millions of fellow sufferers. Then the banquet begins, and there is an hour and a half of that. It is an hour and a half of nerve-wrecking clamor; of intolerable clattering and clashing of knives and forks and plates; of shrieking and shouting commonplaces at one’ste elbow-mates, and of listening to the like shriekings and shoutings from them in return; and when there is a band—and there usually is—the pandemonium is complete, and there is nothing to approach it but hell on a Sunday night. During that awful hour and a half the faces of certain of the men are a study, and are pathetically interesting. These are the men who have been damned—that is to say, they are under sentence to make speeches. The faces of these are drawn and troubled, and exhibit a distressed preoccupation. Such of the damned as have come with memorized speeches are trying to say them over privately and talk to their neighbors at the same time,te and also at the same timete try to look interested in what the neighbors are saying. The result is a curious and piteous jumble of expressions and vacancies in the faces, an exhibition which compels the deep and sincere compassion of any beholder who has been of the damned himself and knows what it is like. The other men under sentence are the men who have not been appointed to speak, but who know they are likely to be called upon, and who are now trying their best to think up something to say; if they are not succeeding they are no better off than those others, as far as comfort goes. It is unquestionably best to stay away from the banquet until the feeding and the racket are over and the time arrived for the speaking to begin; and so, as I have said, I had long ago adopted the policy of staying away until the banquet should be over and the speech-making ready to begin. This judicious policy has saved my life, I suppose.

That banquet at the College was to begin at seven o’clock. At eight nobody was able to tell me what kind of clothes I ought to wear; some said evening dress, others said the

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Was it my conspicuousness that distressed me? Not at all. It was merely that I was not beautifully conspicuous, but uglily conspicuous—it makes all the difference in the world. If I had been clothed from helmet to spurs in plate armor of virgin gold and shining like the sun, I should have been entirely at ease, utterly happy, perfectly satisfied with myself; to be so thunderingly conspicuous, but at the same time so beautifully conspicuous, would have caused me not a pang—on the contrary it would have filled me with joy, pride, vanity, exaltation. When I appear clothed in white, a startling accent in the midst of a sombre multitude in mid-winterte, the most conspicuous object there, I am not ashamed, not ill at ease, but serene and content, because my conspicuousness is not of an offensive sort; it is not an insult, and cannot affront any eye, nor affront anybody’s sense of propriety. My red gown was brought to me just as I was leaving the place—oh infamously too late!

At three the next afternoon we headed for the Pageant, beyond the walls of Oxford, and at once encountered signs of what was coming.

The Oxford Pageantan.

Mostte Americans have been to Oxford and will remember what a dream of the Middle Ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of these modern days. As a dream of the Middle Ages Oxford was not perfect until Pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been for generations lacking. These details began to appear at mid-afternoon on the 27th. At that time singles, couples, groups and squadrons of the three thousand five hundred costumed characters who were to take part in the Pageant began to ooze and drip and stream through house doors, all over the old town, and wend toward the meadows outside the walls. Soon the lanes were thronged with costumes which Oxford had from time to time seen and been familiar with in bygonete centuries—fashions of dress which marked off centuries as by dates, and milestonedte them back, and back, and back, until

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The make-ups of illustrious historic personages seemed perfect, both as to portraiture and costume; one had no trouble in recognizing them. Also, I was apparently quite easily recognizable myself. The first corner I turned broughtte me suddenly face to face with Henry VIIIte, a person whom I had been implacably disliking for sixty years; but when he put out his hand with royal courtliness and grace and said, “Welcome, well-beloved stranger, to my century and to the hospitalities of my realm,” my old prejudiceste vanished away and I forgave him. I think now that Henry VIIIte has been over-abused, and that most of us,te if we had been situated as he was, domestically, would not have been able to get along with as limited a graveyard as he forced himself to put up with. I feel now that he was one of the nicest men in history. Personal contact with a king is more effective in removing baleful prejudices than is any amount of argument drawn from tales and histories. If I had a child I would name it Henry VIIIte, regardless of sex.

Do you remember Charles Ite?—and his broad slouch with the plume in it? and his slender, tall figure? and his body clothed in velvet doublet with lacete sleeves, and his legs in leather, with long rapier at his side and his spurs on his heels? I encountered him at the next corner, and knewte him in a moment—knew him as perfectly and as vividly as I should know the Grand Chainan in the Mississippi if I should see it from the pilot-house after all these years. He bent his body and gave his hat a sweep that fetched its plume within an inch of the ground, and gave me a welcome that went to my heart. This king has been much maligned; I shall understand him better hereafter, and shall regret him more than I have been in the habit of doing these fifty or sixty years. He did some things, in his time,te which might better have been left undone, and which cast a shadow upon his name—we all know that, we all concede it—but our error has been in regarding them as crimeste and in calling them by that name, whereas I perceive now that they were only indiscretions. At every few steps I met persons of deathless name whom I had never encountered before outside of pictures and statuary and history, and these were most thrilling and charming encounters. I had hand-shakeste with Henry IIte, who had not been seen in the Oxford streets for nearly eight hundred years; and with the Fair Rosamondan, whom I now believe to have been chaste and blameless, although I had thought differently about it before; and with Shakspearete, one of the pleasantest foreigners I have ever gotten acquainted with; and with Roger Baconan; and with Queen Elizabeth, who talked five minutes and never swore oncean—a fact which gave me a new and good opinion of her

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Thete Oxford Pageant continued.te

The living pictures were to begin to appear toward four o’clock. Facing and commanding a wide prospect of meadow and winding river and scattered groups of venerable trees, with glimpses of dreamy blue distances between them, was the grand standte, and under its sheltering roof were banked like a slanting garden of flowers several thousand summer-clothed ladies and gentlemen. In the centrete of the stand, down at the front, was a low-railed box with a sofa and chairs, capable of accommodating loosely and comfortably, twenty persons, perhaps. This choice place was for Royalty, but Royalty was detained, and did not comean. Rudyard Kipling and his wife, and I, with two or three others, were substituted by the management, and we represented Royalty as well as we could in a sudden and unprepared way without opportunity for practice. Lord Curzon was presently added; then we did better; for he had been a king, (Viceroy of India), and a very great and competent one.te

The situation, and the outlook, seemed vaguely familiar, for we seemed to be gazing into the swarded and wooded deeps and distances of the operatic stage;te but that was as far as the seeming went: we realized, with a stirring and uplifting feeling, that these lovelinesses were not a painted fiction, but were real, splendidly real, and more noble and gracious and satisfying than any fiction could be; we realized that the little river winding here and there and yonder in the middle-ground, in the shadow of the June-clad old trees, was real water, fresh and sweet, and to our sense the very same water that had been gliding and glinting and whisperingte along between those banks in shadow and sunflash for unnumbered centuries and looking as it looked now—a winsome and worshipful allegory of eternal youth; the snowy swans that were diligently and contentedly breasting its surface, in the way of recreation or business, were real swans, not fictions worked with a string by a “supe”tean hidden behind a pasteboard tree; the country birds that were flitting and singing unafraid all about this bewitching sylvan theatre were real birds, not make-believes; and what a delightful feature they were, with their fearless intrusions, their impudent indifference to the swarming human life there present, and to the pomps and tragedies of Old English history which were soon being displayed under them!te And why shouldn’t they feel at home, and indifferent? They were full of inherited sentiment; their ancestors of the bygonete centuries had actually seen thete pomps and tragedies which

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Here is the first scene; it dates back nearly twelve hundred years:

Thosete were real sheep; they emerged from a forest some distance away on our left, beyond the river and the bridge, and a shepherd clad in skins drove them lazily across a meadow, the sheep taking their time and munching grass in a most real and natural way, and not ostentatiously and fictitiously and criminally and mechanically, as they would have done if they had been on the opera stage under salary. The swarm of skin-clad fishermen fussing at their nets had a genuine look also; and so had the commotions, likewise, which broke out when the beautiful and high-bornte young saint and her maidens arrived in a barge and scrambled up the shore in fright, closely followed by that savage earl and his savage men, who also scrambled ashore from their boatte and started a furious fight and overcame the fishermen and captured the ladies. Everything was so well done that one was continually being thrilled and stirred as the events unfolded themselves and followed briskly one upon another.

In time the actors in this scene went drifting away across the meadows and among the trees to the right, and as they were disappearing in the distance cheering is heard far to the left, mingled with a singing of anthems, and the year 1036 has arrived; a swarming crowd of primitively armed cavalry and foot-soldiers and priests and civilian men and women and boys and girls of that ancient day comes marching by, and the coronation of Harold Harefootan takes place with bountiful pomp and ceremony.

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Next comes Friar Bacon, (1270) illustrious and shining scientist in a dark time when scientists were few and far between;te and he exhibits his legendary Brazen Headan and makes it talk.

He and his crowd pass and disappear, and are followed by a riotous multitude,te (1354) and a historic riot between town and gown takes place. I think I never saw a better riot on any stage. One of the marvels of these pageants was the easy and natural and competent and thoroughly satisfactory acting of these unprofessionalte multitudes of men and women and children—ordinary citizens of the little town of Oxford, every one of them—people who had never acted in their lives until they entered upon drill for these performances a year ago. There was never a hitch, never a stage-wait, never an awkwardness of any kind; the scenes had not the look of stage plays; they seemed distinctly real, and as if they were simply happeningte—happening by impulse, not studied invention.

Next scene—thete Masque of the Mediaeval Curriculum, a fine allegorical piece, the creation of a young Americanan.

Next, Wolseyan receiveste Henry VIIIte at Oxford. (1518.) It was a brilliant and richly upholsteredte and multitudinous double procession marching from two different points and melting together at the centrete of the stage. It was a sumptuouste spectacle, a marvel of variety in costume, an undulating sea of flashing and flushingte colors; when the head of the King’s cavalcade came in sight it was so far away that it looked like a flower-bed gliding along the ground from among the distant trees; this was realte perspective, real distance, and it made the mimic distances of the operatic stage seem very poor by comparison. I had never seen anything so fine and so remote and so moving as this before, and I shall not see its like again; but it has permanently spoiled the opera-perspectiveste for me.

Thete Oxford Pageant concluded.te

The coming, and passing, and disappearing of dazzling pageants continued during the next two hours, without interruption. These great scenes are summarized as follows, in the Book of the Pageantan:

No one to whom was granted the privilege of seeing these great pictures can ever forget them; it was the Arabian Nights come again. The interest was so deep and intense and moving that the flight of time was not noticeable. There was seldom a time, during the four hours, when I had the feeling—a feeling seldom absent at the opera—that this was only a show, not reality; we seemed to be seeing the facts of history, not a mimicry of them. There was one little incident which proved to me that my sense of the reality, the flesh and blood concreteness of these passing shows, was shared by the whole multitude in the grand standte: when Royalty surrendered and the victorious Puritan troops came marching solemnly by, this multitude hissed them!

In a curving sweep of distant meadows beyond the curtaining trees that bordered the river, there were always glimpses of life and movement and color: there were knights in armor prancing along; there were bodies of brown-clad monks and white-clad nuns following on foot; there were crowds of peasants out of all the centuries drifting hither and thither; there were squadrons of infantry plodding along; there were regiments of cavalry flitting past them on the gallop. Always we were having these tinted and sparkling glimpses through the crevices and windows in the foliage, and always the movement was toward the left; always it was the marshaling of the clans to a point in the grove far up on our left, whence they would come streaming, at exactly the appointed moment, down upon our plain. One might well inquire how these movements could be so exactly timed, and kept in such perfect order, over distances so great. Kipling was moved to go out and inquire into this. When he came back he brought the solution of the mystery; he had been on the roof of the grand standte; from there the master of the show was dictating, by telephone, every slightest movement of his thousands, over a stretch of two miles. From his place up there he was conducting every motion, every movement of his host, with the order and system and precision of a general superintending and conducting a battle from a commanding point on the verge of the field. There was also a prompter up there. In front of us the crowds of actors were always uttering cries and delivering speeches appertaining to their parts, and it was matter of surprise that they never hesitated for a word, although there was no prompter out there to help them. It was a happy idea to put him on the roof. He used a megaphone there and easily made himself heard all about the field in front of us,te yet no one in the grand standte could hear him.

I shall not try to describe the wonderful picture at the close, when the whole strength of the histrionic troop came streaming, with banners and music, from three different points of the compass, and fused themselves together, three thousand five hundred

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Two incidents of the 28th of June: the visit to the University Press
and the luncheon with Robert Porter and family, and
interview with the butler who offered his services in order
to have speech with Mr. Clemens.

The next day, (28th June) was a busy one. However that is a term which softly and moderately describes every one of the twenty-seven days which I spent in England. I was most pleasantly and satisfactorily and violently busy straight through each day, from breakfast until whisky punch; whisky punch occurs at 11 p.m.,te after I have been reading and smoking an hour in bed and am ready for sleep. One of the incidents of the 28th was a visit to the ancient, the vast, the illustrious University Press. Under the guidance of its superintendent, Dr. Hartan, I went all over it. For seven years I had been feeling unkindly toward it, but when I found that it was flying the American flag from its staff, in compliment to me, my vanity was touched, and the same result followed that had followed my meeting with Henry VIIIte—a good deal of my prejudice was sponged out.

The buildings are very old, and they enclose a feature which is not possessed by any other printing-office on the planet, I suppose; and a darling feature it is—a roomy great court carpeted with the greenest grass, upon which fallste the flooding sunshine, broken byte the black shadows of venerable trees. From all the four sides,te scores of windows look out upon this beautiful imprisonedte patch of sylvan England, and through them pour the whir and clash of up-to-date steam presseste. It was a curious conjunction, but it had its charm.

The University Press is not a thing of yesterday, it is an antiquity; it dates back to a time when there wasn’t any such thing as a printing-press as yet. In the long ago,te learned monks made books there—made them on vellum with the pen and illuminated them with the brush. At every case in the long composing-rooms stood a young compositor who was an eruditete scholar; these young men were setting type in all the impossible languages known to erudition; they were setting up Egyptian hieroglyphics, (known by sight to you and me,)te and otherte hieroglyphics which I had not seen before. With the deepest interest I examined many galleys of matter, but found none that I could read. There is an abundance of presses, and they are turning out hundreds of books, but they were all in tongues unintelligible to me. Apparently the bulk of these books were Bibles—Bibles in all sorts of languages, including the modern ones. Necessarily the expenses of such an establishment are prodigious, but when Dr. Hart casually observed that all these expenses were paid out of the profits on the Bibles, my prejudice experienced a sudden and acrid resurrection for a moment, for I knew, through Mr. John Murray, what not many people are aware of—to wit: that whereas the stingy and

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One of the other incidents of the 28th gave me peculiar pleasure, and reminded me of the prized welcome extended to me by the stevedores at Tilbury. In Oxford I was the guest of Robert Porteran and his family; he had a luncheon party that day, and the butler of an Oxford don volunteered his services and superintended the function in order that he might have speech of me. After the guests had retired to the drawing-room I returned and talked with him and found, to my large contentment, that he knew ten or fifteen times as much about my books as I knew about them myself. He was an evidence that to me has been granted that rare and precious prize which Louis Stevenson and I dubbed the Suppressed Famean; and so I highly valued his frank and earnest homage. He did not spoil his compliments by adding what other and less gracious people are always adding—“But you are always hearing these things and are tired of them.” It may be that there are persons in the world who get tired of compliments—a thing which I doubt—but I am not one of them; if I should run out of all other nourishment I believe I could live on compliments.

Thete Rhodes Scholars’ Club, and similar benefactions.te

There was still another incident of the 28th of which I wish to make a note: in the evening, after dinner, I went down by invitation to talk to the Rhodes scholars at their cluban—the American Rhodes scholars, I mean. As I understand it, the American Club is made up of American students, and not exclusively of Rhodes American students. There are about ninety American Rhodes scholars on the foundation all the time, for each of our States is privileged to send two.

Rhodes students come from many countries to enrich their minds and broaden and elevate and compact their characters by help of the mighty hand of that dead man, and this will go on, and on, and on, century after century,te until this brisk and alert day of ours shall have drifted back, and back, and back, and melted into the times called ancient; and through all that stretch of time that dead hand will never have been idle, and never other than most nobly and beneficently active; it will have scattered, every year, those precious seeds out of which grow moral and intellectual depth and breadth of character; and year after year and century after century the world will have gathered and wholesomely nourished itself with the resulting harvests. It is a vast work, and a sublime work, that that dead hand is directing from the grave.

From the earliest days—from away back to the Crusades, with their generous hospitals for the diseased and helpless poor—the purse of the rich private citizen has wrought deeds of high and lasting benevolence for mankind—benevolences which

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I have uttered nothing but praises in speaking of the Rhodes benefaction, but they have been wrung from me; they have not come easily and fluently, for I always detested Mr. Rhodesan; I never saw him, either in South Africa or in London; I avoided his vicinity; I never met him, and never wanted to meet him; my praises of what he has done must at least be granted the merit of sincerity. In several ways he was a very great sinner,te but I think there is not a saint in the endless Romante calendar whom he could afford to trade halos with.

The conditions under which the benefits of the Rhodes endowment were to be extended to the Rhodes scholars were drafted by Mr. Rhodes himself; and while I was in Oxford a thing happened which showed what a wise and far-seeing document it wasan.

five pages (about 1100 words) missing

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I take this paragraph from an editorial in this morning’s World:

About once every year some pious public library banishes Huck Finn from its children’s department, andte on the same plea always—that Huck, the neglected and untaught son of a town drunkard, is given to lying, when in difficulty and hard pressed, and is therefore a bad example for young people, and a damager of their morals.

Two or three years ago I was near-byte when one of these banishments was decreed and advertised, and I went over and asked the librarian about itan, and he said yes, Huck was banished for lying. I asked,

“Is there nothing else against him?”te

“No, I think not.”

“Do you banish all books that are likely to defile young morals, or do you stop with Huck?”

“We do not discriminate; we banish all that are hurtful to young morals.”

I picked up a book, and said—

“I see several copies of this book lying around. Are the young forbidden to read it?”

“The Bible? Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“That is a strange question to ask.”

“Very well, then I withdraw it. Are you acquainted with the passages in Huck which are held to be objectionable?”

He said he was; and at my request he took pen and paper and proceeded to write them down for me. Meantime I stepped to a desk and wrote down some extracts from the Bible. I showed them to him and said I would take it as a favor if he would attach his extracts to mine and post them on the wall, so that the people could examine them and see which of the two sets they would prefer to have their young boys and girls read.

He replied coldly that he was willing to post the extracts which he had made, but not those which I had made.

“Why?”

He replied—still coldly—that he did not wish to discuss the matter. I asked if he had some boys and girls in his family, and he said he had. I asked—

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“Of course not!”

“You don’t need to. They read them to themselves, clandestinely. All Protestant children of both sexes do it, and have been doing it for severalte centuries. You did it yourself when you were a boy. Isn’t it so?”

He hesitated, then said no. I said—

“You have lied, and you know it. I think you have been reading Huck Finn yourself, and damaging your morals.”

Once I was a hero. I can never forget it. It was forty years ago, when I was a bashful young bachelor of thirty-two. I lectured in the village of Hudson, New York, and was the guest of the village parson, there being no hotel in the place. In the morning I was summoned to the parlor for family worship. It began with a chapter from the Old Testament. Seatedte elbow to elbow around the walls were the aged clergyman’s family of young folks, along with twenty-one maidens and youths from neighboring homes. I was pleasantly wedged between two young girls—sweet and modest and diffident lassies. The preacher read the first verse; a youth at his left read the second; a girl at the youth’s left read the third—and so on down, toward me. I ran my finger down to my verse, purposing to familiarize myself with it, sote that I could read it acceptably when my turn shouldte come. I got a shock! It was one of those verses which wouldte make a graven image blush. I did not believe I could read it aloud inte such a company, and I resolved that I would not try. Then I noticed that the poor girl at my left had put her finger on that same verse and was showing signs of distress. Was it her verse? Had I miscounted? I counted again, and found it really was her verse, and not mine. By this time myte turn was come. I saw my chance to be a hero, and I rose to the occasion: I braced up and read my verse and hers tooan! I was proud of myself, for it was as fine and grand as saving her from drowning.

The luncheon with Marie Corelli.

I met Marie Corelli at a small dinner party in Germany fifteen years ago, and took a dislike to her at once—a dislike which expanded and hardened with each successive dinner-coursete until,te when we partedte at last, the original mere dislike had grown into a very strong aversion. When I arrived in England, two months ago,te I found a letter from her awaiting me at Brown’s Hotel. It was warm, affectionate, eloquent, persuasive; under its charm the aversion of fifteen years melted away and disappeared. It seemed to me that that aversion must have been falsely based; I thought I must certainly have been mistaken in the woman, and I felt a pang or two of remorse. I answered her letter at once—her love-letter I may say; answered it with a love-letter. Her home is in Shakspeare’ste Stratford. She at once wrote again, urging me in the most beguiling language to stop there and lunch with her when I should be on my way to London, on

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“Consider my side of the matter a little. I have invited Lady Lucy and two other ladies, and three gentlemen; to cancel the luncheon now would inflict upon them the greatest inconvenience; without doubt they have declined other invitations to accept this one; in my own case I have canceled three social engagements on account of this matter.”

I said—

“Which is the superior disaster: that your half-dozen guests be inconvenienced, or the Lord Mayor’s three hundred? And if you have already canceled three engagements, and thereby inconvenienced three sets of guests, canceling seems to come easy to you, and it looks as if you might add just one more to the list, in mercy to a suffering friend.”

It hadn’t the slightest effect; she was as hard as nails. I think there is no criminal in any jail with a heart so unmalleable, so unmeltable, so unphazeablete, so flinty, so uncompromisingly hard as Marie Corelli’s. I think one could hit it with a steel and draw a spark from it.

She is about fifty years old, but has no gray hairs; she is fat and shapeless; she has a gross animal face; she dresses for sixteen, and awkwardly and unsuccessfully and pathetically imitates the innocent graces and witcheries of that dearest and sweetest of all ages; and so her exterior matches her interior and harmonizes with it, with the result—as I think—that she is the most offensive sham, inside and out, that misrepresents and satirizes the human race to-day. I would willingly say more about her, but it would be futile to try; all the adjectives seem so poor, and feeble, and flabby, this morning.

So we went to Stratford by rail, with a car-changete or two, we not knowing that one could save time and fatigue by walking. She received us at Stratford station with her carriage, and was going to drive us to Shakspeare’ste church, but I canceled thatan; she insisted, but I said that the day’s program was already generous enough in fatigues

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She said she had been purchasing the house which the founder of Harvard College had once lived inan, and was going to present it to America—another advertisement. She wanted to stop at that dwelling and show me over it, and she said there would be a crowd there. I said I didn’t want to see the damned house. I didn’t say it in those words, but in that vicious spirit, and she understood; even her horses understood, and were shocked, for I saw them shudder. She pleaded, and said we need not stop for more than a moment, but I knew the size of Marie’s moments, by now, when there was an advertisement to be had, and I declined. As we drove by I saw that the house and the sidewalk were full of people—which meant that Marie had arranged for another speech. However, we went by, bowing in response to the cheers, and presently reached Marie’s house, a very attractive and commodious English home. I said I was exceedingly tired, and would like to go immediately to a bed-chamberte and stretch out and get some rest, if only for fifteen minutes. She was voluble with tender sympathy, and said I should have my desire at once; but deftly steered me into the drawing-room and introduced me to her company. That being over, I begged leave to retire, but she wanted me to see her garden, and said it would take only a moment. We examined her garden, I praising it and damning it in the one breath—praising with the mouth and damning with the heart. Then she said there was another garden, and dragged me along to look at it. I was ready to drop with fatigue, but I praised and damned as before, and hoped I was through now and might be suffered to die in peace; but she beguiled me to a grilled iron gate and pulled me through it into a stretch of waste ground where stood fifty pupils of a military school, with their master at their head—arrangement for another advertisement. She asked me to make a little speechan, and said the boys were expecting it. I complied briefly, shook hands with the master and talked with him a moment, then—well then we got back to the house. I got a quarter of an hour’s rest, then came down to the luncheon. Toward the end of it that implacable woman rose in her place, with a glass of champagne in her hand, and made a speech! With me for a text, of course. Another advertisement, you see—to be worked into the newspapers. When she had finished I said—

“I thank you very much”—

and sat still. This conduct of mine was compulsory, therefore not avoidable; if I had made a speech, courtesy and custom would have required me to construct it out of thanks and compliments, and there was not a rag of that kind of material lurking anywhere in my system.

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I have now exposed myself as being a person capable of entertaining and exhibiting a degraded and brutally ugly spirit, upon occasion, and in making this exposure I have done my duty by myself and by my reader—notwithstanding which I claim and maintain that in any other society than Marie Corelli’s my spirit is the sweetest that has ever yet descended upon this planet from my ancestors, the angels.

I spoke at the Lord Mayor’s banquet that night, and it was a botchan.

Mr. Clemens dines with Sir Gilbert and Lady Parker.

Ashcroft’s next note says: “Sunday, June 30thte. Dined with Sir Gilbert and Lady Parkeran.”

It was a large company, with a sprinkling of titles, and also with a sprinkling of men and women distinguished for achievement; but the whole scene is abolished from my memory by one wonderful face, just as the stars sparkling upon the horizon are swallowed up in the glory of the rising sun and extinguished. I am referring in this prodigious way to the face of a young woman. By the figure which I have used I have intended to indicate that this young creature’s beauty was of the sort which is called dazzling; it is the right word; that face dazzled all the other faces to extinctionte, and just blazed and blazed in a splendid solitude; and in that solitude it still goes on blazing in my memory to this day. Lady—Lady something—but the name has gone from me; names and faces will not stay with me; that name has departed, but I should know the face again anywhere. The style was English, the features were English, the complexion was English, the set of the head was English, the poise was English, the character was English, the dignity was English—all high-born English; but over it all, and pervadingte itte and suffusingte it with that subtle something which we call charm, was a friendly and outreaching good-fellowshipte and an easy and natural and unstudied grace of manner and carriage which was American—rare everywhere, and infrequent, but most frequent among our people, I think. I explained to her what I thought of her, and said England ought to be proud of such a product; but she smiled like a complimentedte angel, and rippled out a musical little laugh, and said she was an American product and destitute of English blood.

It was a very pleasant surprise. Later, at another dinner party, this pleasant surprise was repeated, where I mistook a couple ofte titled American ladies for English women;te they werete women whose looks, whose ways, and the set and style of whose upholstery was distinctly English. Those two ladies were grieved and disappointed; for they had hoped and believedte that they had kept their beloved nationality unmodified and unalloyed by

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There was talk of that soaring and brilliant young statesman, Winston Churchill, son of Lord Randolph Churchill and nephew of a duke. I had met him at Sir Gilbert Parker’s seven years before,te when he was twenty-three years old, and had met him and introduced him to his lecture audience, a year later, in New York, when he had come over to tell of the lively experiences he had had as a war correspondent in the South African war, and in one or two wars on the Himalayan frontier of India. Sir Gilbert Parker said—

“Do you remember the dinner here seven years ago?”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember it.”

“Do you remember what Sir William Vernon Harcourtan said about you?”

“No.”

“Well,te you didn’t hear it. You and Churchill went up to the top floor to have a smoke and a talk, and Harcourt wondered what the result would be. He said that whichever of you got the floor first would keep it to the end, without a break; he believed that you, being old and experienced, would get it, and that Churchill’s lungs would have a half hour’ste rest for the first time in five years. When you two came down, by and by, Sir William asked Churchill if he had had a good time, and he answered eagerly, ‘Yes.’ Then he asked you if you had had a good time. You hesitated, then said without eagerness, ‘I have had a smoke.’ ”

Dinner with Sidney Lee, and call afterwards at Mrs. Macmillan’s to see Lord and Lady Jersey.

Well, to resumete from Ashcroft’s notes:

“Monday, July 1te. Dined with Sidney Lee at the Garrick Cluban, and called at Mrs. Macmillan’s, to see Lady Jerseyan, on the way home.”

It was a distinguished company at the dinner, and once more I encountered J. M. Barrie; also once more he sat on the other side of the table and out of conversing distance. The same thing happened in London twice, seven years ago, and once in New Yorkan since then. I have never had five minutes’ talk with him that wasn’t broken off by an interruption; after the interruption he always dissolves mysteriously and disappears. I should like to have one good unbroken talk with that gifted Scot some day before I die.

The Garrick was familiar to me; I had often fed there in bygonete years as guest of Henry Irving, Toole, and other actors—all dead now. It could have been there, but I think it was at Bateman’s, thirty-five years ago, that I told Irving and Wills, the playwright, about the whitewashing of the fence by Tom Sawyeran, and thereby captured a chapter on cheap terms; for I wrote it out when I got back to the hotel while it was fresh in my mind.

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It was long ago, long ago!te and not even an echo of that turbulence was left in this room where it had once made so much noise and display. Trollope is dead; Hughes is dead; Leveson-Gowerte is dead; doubtless the obliterated guest is dead; Joaquin Miller is white-headed, and mute and quiette in his dear mountainsan.

I arrived at Mr. Macmillan’s a little after ten o’clock, and found there a number of old friends besides Lord and Lady Jersey, and several strangers;te one of whom had a special interest for me because he was of the blood of that fine creature and prized friend of forty years ago, “Charley,” tenth Lord Fairfaxan, citizen of Maryland by birth and rearing, citizen of Nevada and San Francisco by adoption, a man whom I have said many praiseful and admiring things about in an earlier chapter of this Biography. This handsome young gentleman at the Macmillans’ was either English or had been away from America long enough to acquire the English stamp.

I think that the successor of “Charley” of San Francisco was the last American lord, and was followed by a successor who moved to England and remained, thus leaving the great republic without a single hereditary lord, and extinguishingte a distinction which the country had enjoyed for several generations. This present young bearer of the title was the successor of “Charley’s” successor.te

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The dinner to Sidney Lee given by Andrew Carnegie in New York, in 1902.

I had not seen Sidney Lee since 1902, when he made a flying visit to our side of the ocean and was banqueted by Andrew Carnegie, one night, in his new palace at 92d streette and Fifth Avenuean. He is not now a bashful man, but is as much at his ease in company as is anybody, whereas when he came to America that time there was only one other man on our soil who could successfully compete with him in bashfulness, and that was Joel Uncle Remus Harris. Sidney Lee’s bashfulness spread out and covered the whole Northernte half of the United States, and Harris’s crowded the Southernte half; there was no room in the republic for another man of this pattern. There were twenty men at Carnegie’s; in the drawing-room, before dinner, they were introduced to Mr. Lee, one by one, and they were all struck by his extreme bashfulness. They were strangely bashful themselves at the dinner, yet there was no man present who had not been a long time before the public and accustomed to foregathering with all sorts of people under all sorts of conditions. That dinner afforded the strangest and most unaccountable exhibitions of timidity I have ever witnessed; I have never seen anything like it among grown-up men, either before or since then, in my long pilgrimage. Was Mr. Lee the cause of it? Or was it Mrs. Carnegie? I have asked myself that conundrum many a time, but have never yet been able to answer it to my satisfaction. Mrs. Carnegie was the only lady present. I took her out, and sat at her right, at the centrete of the table; opposite me, across the table, sat Mr. Carnegie with Mr. Lee at his right; next to Lee sat John Burroughsan, the naturalist; next to Burroughs satte Carl Schurzan, great soldier and statesman; next to Schurz sat Melville Stonean, head of the Associated Press of the planet; next to Stone sat Horace Whitean, old and famous and able journalist. At Carnegie’s left sat Mr. Howells; at Mr. Howells’s left sat Gilder, of the Centuryte; and so on—I will not try to name the rest of the assemblage. When the feast was finished and the black coffee and cigars installed, Mr. Carnegie—smiley and complacent little man!—rose in his place to speak. His smiliness, his complacency, his ease, his confidence—supports which had never failed him in his life, before, upon such an occasion—withered quickly away and vanished before he had uttered a word; it was a new and surprising and most interesting thing to see. Carnegie was in a bad stage-frightte; everybody saw it, yet nobody was entirely able to believete it, I suppose. When he began to speak, the words came hesitatingly—gaspingly, one may fairly say—teand with disastrous spaces between; he at once began to advertise his fright and his nervousness by that couple of age-worn indications which the distressed novice has unconsciously resorted to at banquets since the beginning of time: first he took up his wine-glasses one at a time, as a player takes up chessmen, and made a new arrangement of them on the cloth; then he took them up again, one at a time, and grouped them in a new way; again he took them up, and again changed the grouping—all this with a painful attention to detail that was most uncomfortable to witness, so charged was it with doubt and miserable anxiety; next he resorted to that other ancient sign, the fussing with his napkin. He folded it, kneaded it with his knuckles;te he turned it around

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Sidney Lee got up and shivered—stood shivering the most of a minute, but not all of it—uttered three or four quite inaudible sentences, and sat down still alive but not noticeably so.

Mr. Carnegie got up and performed again with napkin and glasses, and with palsied lips and extinguished voice, and resumed his seat. I had not caught a word that I could understand. Apparently he had been introducing John Burroughs, for Burroughs got up and began to rock on his base, and quiver, and swallow the dry swallow which indicates distress and which compels the compassion of all witnesses. What he said was confused and disjointed, and marred with hesitations and repetitions, but one could at least hear it. He wandered hopelessly and helplessly for a minute or two, hunting for a text, skirmishing for an idea; then I spoke across and came to his rescue with the suggestion that he discard the conventions and step boldly out upon familiar ground and talk shop. I said that in a time gone by he had published an article in which he had offered the theory, with reservations, that the reason an oak forest always grew up in the place previously occupied by a pine forest when the pine forest had been removed, was because the squirrels had used the carpet of pine-needles as a hiding-place for acorns, and had forgotten them and left them there, with the result that when the pines were removed the sun had a chance to warm the acorns and make them sprout—and asked him to say whether he had since established the correctness of his theory. This text turned his language loose and he had no further trouble with his speech.

Carl Schurz, that marvelously ready and fluent and felicitouste handler of our great English tongue on its highest planes, followed Burroughs and furnished us another surprise. He had never been frightened before, in all the history of his long and illustrious public career, but he was frightened now; all his noble and charming and exquisite phrasing was gone, and he stumbled pathetically along over a bumping corduroy road of disjointed commonplaces and poverties of expression, and soon reached the edge of his difficult world and fell over it and subsided, a defeated man.

Melville Stone rose, stammered, wandered, straggled, got lost, andte was quickly vanquishedte and added to the muster-rollte of the failures.

The very same fate befell Horace White.

Then Howells got up and bent over the table with his left hand supporting his curve, while he arranged and re-arranged his wine-glasses with his right, and gasped and stuttered

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Gilder followed, and failed; when he got through, any stranger could have told by the look of his napkin that it had been helping a scared man make a speech.

Mr. Hornbloweran, a celebrated advocate, followed Gilder. He tried to talk—indeed he made what could be justly called a heroicte effort to do it—but he soon gave it up. He said he would frankly confess that his trouble was that he was frightened; that he was frightened to speechlessness; that he could not divine why, and was wholly unable to account for his curious and novel condition, but that the fact remained as stated:te he was frightened,te and couldn’t go on. He said he could not remember ever having had a like experience since he had made his success at the bar. Then he sat down looking thankful that his ordeal was over.

I forgot to say that I followed Sidney Lee—but the omission is of no consequence; I was in the conflict before that deadly and mysterious contagion of fright had got well started, and so I escaped infection.

Luncheon with Henniker Heatonte and discussion of cheap ocean postage—Mr. Clemens’s postal check scheme.

Ashcroft’s note:

“Lunched with Henniker Heatontean, M.P., at the House of Commons; dined with Mr. and Mrs. Harry Brittain at the Savoy.”

The luncheon had a purpose, and lasted two hours, but it didn’t last long enough to get down to the purpose. The twelve or fifteen men present had been chosen with an eye to that purpose, which was political and commercial, and of international importance. Mr.te Sydney Buxton, the Postmaster Generalte, was present, also T. P. O’Connoran, M.P., also the Earl of Crawford and Balcarrestean. I think all the rest were M.P.’s. I understood that all present favored the scheme—or rather the two schemes, for there were two; I had a scheme and Henniker Heatonte had a scheme, and our idea was to join our strength and work for both schemes; both were to be freely discussed at the luncheon, and I was to have a private heart to heart talk with the Postmaster Generalte afterwards. Henniker Heatonte has for years been the diligent, acute, and tireless apostle of cheap ocean postage, and in spite of all kinds of official and parliamentary opposition—teexcept the intelligent kind—tehe has carried the bulk of his dream to a successful conclusion. He had a hard time proving to doubting Parliaments and postmasters generalte that if postage to the British colonies and to far-offte India should be reduced from five cents to two, the resulting tremendous addition to business and social correspondence would

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My project was a postal check—a notion which I conceivedte and elaborated in Vienna about the end of 1897, and further elaborated and ultimatelyte completed in the summer and fallte of 1898an. Our minister at the Courtte of Vienna at the time was Charlemagne Tower, our present Ambassadorte to the Courtte of Berlin. He examined it carefully, in detail, and decided that it was good and workable, and that it would abolish our clumsy and stupid postal order system, and would also put a stop to the vast and growing and risky business of sending postage-stamps through the mail in payment for small purchases. A few days afterward I read my elaborated scheme to two other men—one of them an old friend in the insurance business, the other a new acquaintance. This document was intended for publication as a magazine article, and I have it yet, much scored by emendations, much damaged by handling, but still intact and legible. In London a year later, (’99, if my memory is sound), I came across a Harper’s Weekly with a paragraph in it which interested me. It named a member of Congress, and said he was about to bring forward a bill for a postal checkan, and then went on and described my check with nice exactness. I judged that that young acquaintance of mine in Viennate had admired my scheme enough to talk about it, and that its details had finally wandered to America and fallen under the attention of that Congressmante. My name was not mentioned, but the omission was of no consequence to me; I hoped the man would push the project in Congress and make a success of it. I thought I might be able to help him, so I sent a copy of my article to McClure for publication in his magazine; I also pinned to it the clipping from Harper’s Weekly. I thought it likely that he might question the value of the articlete now that the clipping revealed the fact that what I was saying was lacking in freshness, and my conjecture was right; McClure did not publish it.te

I never heard of that Congressmante or his postal check afterward. I think he was a Tennesseean, but am not sure. A year or a year and a half ago, I read in the Americante Review of Reviews a description of a project by a Northern Congressmante whereby the transmission of money by mail was to be much simplified, and at the same time rendered convenient and safe. It did not seem to me that this invention, as described and

[begin page 108]

I heard no more of the matter until four or five days ago; then a parcel reached me from the Review of Reviews containing my ancient article and some other documents concerning the matter of postal checks. Also, a fresh copy of my article with “emendations;” also an invitation to aid the good cause.te

I find the documents interesting. One of them is House Bill 7053, entitled “A Bill to Prevent Robbing the Mail, to Provide a Safer and Easier Method of Sending Money by Mail, and to Increase the Postal Revenue.te Introduced December 13, 1905, by Mr. Gardner of Michigan; referred to the Committee on the Post-Office and Post-Roads, and ordered to be printed.”te I like the bill very much. In all its essentials it is my scheme as mapped out in my article written in Vienna in ’98 and ’99.te

There are some printed slips in which the various merits of a postal check are ably and urgently argued; they are the same ones used by me in my article; I do not perceive that one has been omitted. The earliest date mentioned is 1902—two or three years after my scheme leaked into print as per the paragraph published in Harper’s Weekly, as heretofore mentioned.

In these documents the scheme is called the “invention”te of a Mr. W. C. Postan. It is stated, with a trace of conscious magnanimity, that he stands ready to confer it upon the Government as a free gift; he wants no money. Why,te even that idea is not original. In ’98 I wrote John Hay, from Viennaan,te and said I had invented a postal check scheme, and asked him to talk to the Postmaster Generalte about it. I remarked that the Government would not be likely to be willing to buy it of me, because upon examination the War Departmentte would perceive that youte couldn’t kill Christians with it, and therefore the Governmentte would naturally take but a slight interest in it. Mr. Post heard about that, probably, from John Hay, or others in Washington, and it has admonished him to be magnanimous.

However, I am wandering far afield. I will inter that old postal-check article of mine in an Appendixan, where the curious may find it if they want it—and now let us get back to London.te

Henniker Heatonte luncheon continued—Luncheon with George Bernard Shaw.

It was lively and interesting, was Mr. Henniker Heaton’ste luncheon—I mean the talk was—but we forgot all about the formidable world-questions which we were assembled

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Ashcroft’s note:

“Wednesday, July 3. Luncheon with George Bernard Shawan; dined with Moberly Bell.”te

Bernard Shaw has not completed his fifty-second year yet, and therefore is merely a lad. The vague and far-off rumble which he began to make five or six years ago is near-by now, and is recognizable as thunder. The editorial world lightly laughed at him during four or five of those years, but it takes him seriously now; he has become a force, and it is conceded that he must be reckoned with. Shaw is a pleasant man; simple, direct, sincere, animated;te but self-possessed, sane, and evenly poised, acute, engaging, companionable, and quite destitute of affectations. I liked him. He showed no disposition to talk about himself or his work, or his high and growing prosperities in reputation and the materialities;te but mainly—teand affectionately and admiringly—tedevoted his talk to William Morris, whose close friend he had been,te and whose memory he deeply reveres. He again regretted that I had not known Morris, and again quoted Morris’s colossal encomium upon “Huck Finn”—things which Mr. Shaw had already said to me in a letteran. The luncheon was in his own apartment, overlooking the Thames, and there were only three guests. Some of the talking was done by the three, for form’s sake, but we put the most of it upon Shaw, by preference, and to our own profit. One of the guests told me afterward that Shaw had had a troubled and discouraging and difficult time of it in acquiring a market for his literature in the beginning;te that in the first nine years he earned only six pounds—five for an ingeniously worded patent medicine advertisement, fifteen shillings for an article in an obscure journal, and five for a verse which he contributed to a child’s picture-book. He had been heard to say that he wrote the verse as a burlesque, and it was accepted seriously; adding “as many later writings of mine written seriously have been accepted as burlesques.”

There was a choice company at Moberlyte Bell’san, and by consequence it was a delightful evening. Mr. Bell is manager of the London Times, and therefore is in a sense deputy king of England. He has held this powerful office many years. Mrs. Clemens and I dined at his house many times when we were sojourning in London seven years ago. Those dinners were on a large scale; the guests numbered as many as forty; they were drawn from all ranks and were of all kinds and qualities, except the commonplace. At one of those gatherings there was a theatrical little episode: at Mr. Bell’s right sat a handsome and stately and richly dressed lady, a Continental princess♦te of proud and ancient lineage—a person of special interest, at the time, for the reason that she had lately been making Cecil Rhodes’s life uncomfortablean for him in South Africa, she declaring with energy and passion that he had proposed to her and been accepted, and had then retired from the engagement without pretext or excuse. Rhodes called these statements nonsense, and denounced them, both publicly and privately, as fabrications. The noise that ensued was great, and it traveled far; because of this,te the Princess was the centrete of interest at Mr.

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“How could she be so cool and so calm? She was perfectly indifferent.”

The other answered, in a modified and confidential voice,

“She always breaks that string, and makes that display, when she has a good house—and besides, the real ones are in the bank; these are paste.”

Luncheon at Sir James Knowles’s.

Ashcroft’s note:

“July 4te. Lunched at Sir James Knowles’san; attended the banquet in celebration of Independence Dayan, at the Hotel Cecil.”

I perceived that at Sir James’s I was upon familiar ground, for his house was situated just within the spacious court of the monster human hive called the Queen Anne Mansionsan, a caravansary which I and my family had helped to supportte and renderte prosperous during a fortnight or so, seven or eight years ago. Damn the place, I remember it well! In that court you stand as in a well whose dull-brown walls stretch away skyward, and so multitudinously perforated with windows is each wall that it looks like a colander. It was an easy mountain to get lost in, and I had that experience many times. There were guide-boardstean, but that was not sufficient; there ought to have been guides. It was said that in the course of time many persons had got lost in that place and were never found again, and this was true; for I often met their remains hunting around for their apartments and moaning. There were many dining roomste in that place and the food was good, and well served; one could not find fault with the service in bedrooms and private parlors, because there wasn’t any; substantially speaking it did not exist. I acquired a prejudice against the place on the first day. Mrs. Clemens needed to go out and buy some necessary things, and she had not much time to spare. I sent down a circular checkan to the office to be cashed—a check good for its face in any part of the world, as any ordinary ass would know—but the ass who was assifying for the Queen Anne Mansions on salary didn’t know it; indeed I think that his assitude transcended any assfulness I have ever met in this world or elsewhere. We waited, anxiously and

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As I stood there with my mind wandering back over the past I called to mind a very interesting conversation which I had had on the first night of our stay in that house—a conversation with an English gentleman who hadte sent in his card after dinneran, then followed it in person by my request. It was the last day of September. Relations between England and the Transvaal were in a very strained condition, but that was all:te that that little handful of Boers down there would actually stand out until war should become a necessity, was unthinkable; their high attitude must surely be only a “bluff.”te This gentleman surprised me by saying it was not a bluff, and that there would certainly be a war; I think he even said he knew it, but I am not quite sure as to that. He was a colonel in the British army and had seen long service in India, in the artillery. He uttered two predictions, and framed them in quite positive language: to wit, that the war would break out in eleven daysan, and that it would be an artillery war. It was uncommonly good prophesying, as the event showed: the war was proclaimed on the 11th of October, and it was an artillery war.

The luncheon at Sir James Knowles’s was in honor of a Prussian princessan of the blood. She was young and handsome and queenly, and was quite unroyally gifted intellectually; she seemed to know a good deal about everything, and to know it well; well enough to talk about it ably and entertainingly. She was an expert with the brush, and in music, and in designing and embroidery, and in several other fine arts; in fact in the matter of accomplishments she was a wonder, considering her place in the social world. London is certainly a wealthy place in distinguished human beings; no other city approaches it in this respect; she can furnish samples to several scores of dinners and luncheons at one time, and have more left.

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Whitelaw Reid’s reception, which Mr. Clemens was unable to attend—Remarks about Whitelaw Reid’s career.

I was not able to go to Whitelaw Reid’s afternoon reception of the American contingent, and so my ticket, (No. 2384), remained unused. The tickets suggest that the national function was conducted on a new plan. It was. It had not been the custom, before, to admit by ticket; any American could come that wanted to, and sometimes five hundred came, sometimes a thousand. In the present case, as usual,te there was no restriction; any American could come who applied for a ticket; four thousand applied, and they were all there. It must have been that our Ambassadorte was proposing to provide refreshments, and needed to know what quantity would be required. Reid occupies the most palatial private residence in Londonan, and a crush could be expected, for all the Americans would be eager to see it. It was indeed a crush, and half as many people were in it as were present at the King’s great garden party at Windsoran, which was attended by a multitude somewhat exceeding eight thousand; still the big house was equal to the emergency.

Reid’s salary is $17,500, and it pays the hire of all his domestic servantste except that of his cooks; I am speaking of the service in his town house—he has another great palace in the country. His town house rent is a hundred thousand dollars a yearan, and he has other expenses, but they are not a burden to him. He and his predecessor, John Hay, were salaried members of the New York Tribune staff when I first knew them; both married unnumbered millions of dollarsan. Hay was a man of great and varied talents and accomplishments, and was conspicuously well equipped for the several great national and international posts which he had filled in his brilliant career; and he climbed to several of them without the help of wealth, and would doubtless have climbed the rest of the way without that help, and all the public would have approved, and would also have affectionately applauded and rejoiced. But the like is not the case with Reid. He is educatedte but not accomplished; his talents are few and not distinguished; he is not actually and precisely commonplace, but comes dangerously near to being that; he can write out a good enough speech, and can deliver it well enough, and with dignity, but he cannot stir a house with it—it gives off no real fire, for there is no real fire in him, and his imitations of it are not effective; they are artificial, and they ring hollow. He is narrow, and hard, cold, calculating, unaffectionate, except toward his family and a very small circle of especial friends; his dislikes are strong and steady and lasting, and he is unforgiving. He was born with a good commercial head, and has improved it by experience, but he has no other talent that perceptibly rises toward distinction. It has served him well. By grace of it he moved up, step by step, from war correspondent to a staff position on the Tribune under Greeley; to managing editor; to part proprietor; to proprietor-in-chiefte; to political importance, by right of this powerful position; to minister to France and candidate for Vice Presidentte, partly by the same right but mainly

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More remarks about Whitelaw Reid, and about Edward House: his bringing the injunction against the “Prince and Pauper” play, etc.

As a pendant to my closing remark of yesterday I wish to insert here, from this morning’s paper, the following striking and photographically exact portrait of the President:

In the early days Whitelaw Reid and I were friends, but in 1872 a coldness occurred. Reid and Edward H. House had a falling out. House told me his side of the matter, and at second-hand I got Reid’s side of it—which was simply that he considered House a “blatherskite,”te and wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I ranged myself on House’s sidean, and relations between Reid and me ceased; they were not resumed for twenty-two years; and then not cordially, but merely diplomatically, so to speak; we have met at people’s tables, and smiled and passed the time of day, but neither of us has muchte enjoyed even those slight love passages. I have never invited him, and he has never invited me,

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In justice to Reid I confess that many and many a year ago I found out that he was right concerning Edward H. House. Reid had labeled him correctly; he was a blatherskite. He was a tall and handsome creature, something over thirty years of age, and had a mobile, animated, and brightly intellectual face,te and most charming and engaging manners. He went out to Japan in 1873, (his second trip thither, I think,)te and he called upon me in London on his way. I had been helping the London newspaper men fetch the Shah of Persia over from Ostend, I being for forty-eight hours in the service of Dr. Hosmer, London representative of the New York Herald. I had dictated an account of the excursion covering two or three columns of the Herald, and had charged and received three hundred dollars and expenses for it—a narrative which seemed to the Herald to lack humor, a defect which the New York office supplied from its own resources, which were poor and coarse and silly beyond imagination. House was present when Hosmer came to me with the money, and he lightly borrowed it of mean and changed the subject. A year or two afterward he wrote me from Japan that his New York banker had failed, at cost to him of twenty-five thousand dollarsan, all the money he had in the world, and he hoped I had been wise enough to cash the draft for three hundred dollars previously sent to me by him,te while it still possessed value. This was the first time I had heard of the draft, and with this mention of it the incident closed.

But not the intimacy. I did not doubt that House had sent the draft, and that with my customary carelessness I had mislaid it and forgotten all about it. About 1882, or along there somewhere, House came back from Japan desperately knotted up and disabled by rheumatisman. He brought with him a bright and good-natured and wonderfully muscular Japanese ladan who wheeled him about in a Bath chair, and who carried him in his arms from bed to chair and from chair to bed, weighty as he was, and did it with unfailing patience and serenity, although House gave him a vigorous cursing every time he got a jolt that gave him pain. I visited him in New York. I knew—at least by histe testimony—that his alleged twenty-five thousand dollars had come from dramatic assistance rendered by him to Dion Boucicault. He said that he had done more than half of the literary work on “Arrah-na-Pogue,” and that he had received the twenty-five thousand dollars as his share of the royalties. I believed the statement, and even went

[begin page 115]

However, when I visited House in New York I was looking for a dramatist for “The Prince and the Pauper,” and this principal author of Boucicault’s great play seemed to me to be the very man I wanted; so I proposed that House dramatize the book. He was indifferent, and declinedan. I hunted up another dramatist—Mrs. Abby Sage Richardson—and gave her the contract on a royalty. She hadn’t ever dramatized anything, but knew she could; therefore she was satisfactory to me. She made a dramatization, and a marvel it was. She was sober enough, but her play was drunk—quite the drunkest play of the century, and quite the most impossible of representation, outside the madhouse, but Danielte Frohman’s stage-manager took it in hand and reformed it, and little Elsie Lesliean played it to the public satisfaction. Meantime, House had come to Hartford, bringing his Bath chair, his muscular little slave, and a young Japanese girl, Kotoan, whom he called his adopted daughter. I had invited them, and they were our guests during two or three monthsan; then they returned to New York. After the play was put on the boards, House notified me, through his lawyer, Robert G. Ingersoll, to take it off or he would bring an injunction suit. He claimed that although there were no writings supporting the claim, I had asked him to dramatize the book and he had agreed to do it, and had now begun his task. He soon quarreled with Ingersoll, discharged him, and hired Howe and Hummelte in his placean. Birds of a feather, etc.; Hummel is in the penitentiary, nowan.te Hummelte renewed the notice to me; I declined to consider it; then he brought the suit. The case came before Judge Daly in chambers. I testified by deposition; so did House and Koto. House and Koto swore that when I talked with House in New York about the play, House had eagerly accepted my proposition;te that a detailed contract was arranged, and that its terms were so definite and so perfectly understood by both parties that we agreedte that to reduce it to writing was quite unnecessary. House and Koto also swore that House and I frequently took counsel together concerning the play while they were my guests in Hartford. To be brief, and also exact, the pair swore to not a thing that was not a lie. Judge Daly’s decision went against mean, upon one ground and upon one ground only—to wit, thatte the testimony upon the two sides utterly disagreeing, the veracity of a sick man, confined to his chamber, was more to be depended upon than the oath of a man who was wellan, and at large. It sounds odd, but I have truly stated Judge Daly’s reason for deciding the case in House’s favor.

A temporary injunction was put upon the box-office, and the play permitted to gote on with its successful career, the royalties to be paid into the court and remain there, undisturbed, until House’s suit for a permanent injunction should be decided one way or the otheran.te Then House and his little family removed to Hartford and established themselves in the Isabella Beecher Hooker cottage in our neighborhood. House thought he would like to have two “Prince and Pauper” plays going, so he wrote one and put it in the hands of the parents of little Tommy Russell, a juvenile actor of good and growing reputation, House making himself responsible for the expense of staging it. It was to open in Brooklyn, and the date was advertised. On that day George Warner, brother of Charles D., came

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Thete new play openedte in Brooklyn,te and was a complete and perfect and irremediable failure; there was no second night; notice was sent to Hartford, with the request that House come forward and pay the bills, which were formidable—but hete had already skipped, and was safean.

The temporary injunction on Mrs. Richardson’s play was at once removed, and I was told that she went promptly forward and got her royalties out of the court’s hands. I instructed Mr. Bainbridge Colby to go and get my share. At the end of two years I asked him about it and found that he had forgotten to attend to it. I then placed the matter in the hands of Whitford, that incomparable ass, and when I asked him about it, two or three years afterward, I found that he also had forgotten it; time went on, and I presently forgot all about it myself; I have never collected those royalties, and I do not now know what became of theman.

I was wrong; Whitelaw Reid was right; House was a blatherskite.

The Fourth of July Banquet at the Hotel Cecil, and copy of the official report of Mr. Clemens’s speech; also paragraph from President Murray Butler’s speech.

The Fourth of July dinner that night was devoured in the great banqueting hall of the Hotel Cecil. Every chair on the floor was occupied by men, and all the seats in the gallery by ladies. It was a fine spectacle.

Banqueteering is becoming more and more endurable as the years go by, both in England and America, for the reason that not so many speeches are permitted now as was formerly the case. If the feeding-task could now be cut down two-thirds, reducing the usual menu from fourteen courses to three and a half or four, men would no longer be justified in ranking the fear of death and the fear of the banquet together. My first experience of a banquet in a foreign country was in England, thirty-four years ago. It was in the Guildhallte, and it was said that there were nine hundred banqueteers present. I think it was the truth, for the din and crash and clash of a roaring and thundering and piercing confusion of sounds proceeding from an all-pervading storm of high-voicedte conversation, and from the ceaseless collision of multitudinous knives and forks and plates, remains in my ears unto this day—dulled to a vague rumble and gnashing by lapse of time, but not wholly abolished, and never to be wholly abolished until I die.

Ite was therete by appointment, to respond to a regular toast, of which there were nine!

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At the greatest of all American banquets—the banquet to General Grant, in Chicago in 1879 when he returned from around the worldte—there were actually sixteente regular toasts, and sixteen carefully prepared responses to them; again I had that high privilege, the place of honor—I was No. 16an! If I remember rightly, that Guildhallte banquet and the Grant banquet lasted from half pastte seven in the evening until after two in the morning; nobody died, but of course there were some close calls.

At this recent Fourth of July banquet that I have been talking about, there were but four regular toasts and four speeches in response to them, and the function was over by about eleven o’clock. First the King’s health was drunk, standing, and in silence, in accordance with ancient and invariable custom; next the health of the President of the United States was drunk. Sir Mortimer Durand, late Ambassadorte to the United States, responded to it in a happy speech of considerable lengthan; next, in a good and elaborate speech, Whitelaw Reid proposed “The Day Wete Celebrate.” By appointment, I responded. I will here copy the official report of that effort, after striking out the bracketed “laughters” and “renewed laughters,” and so on:te

The next and last speech was made by President Murray Butleran, of Columbia University, in response to the toast to “Our Guests.” I will select, and insert here, a remark from his speech,te because it pays me a compliment. The reason I do not put in the rest of his speech is because it dealt with other matters. Speeches which do not deal with me I regard as irrelevancies.

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Luncheon with Sir Norman Lockyer—Luncheon
with the Plasmon directorste—Paying calls with little Francesca—The Punchte dinner.

Ashcroft’s notes:

No white-headed antiquity of my sex whose years exceed seventy, likes to pay social calls; he dreads to see the calling hour come round, he rejoices when the taskte is over for the day; he is often sensible of a guilty gladness when he finds the people “out.” But I know a secret now that will make call-payingte a delight to me hereafter. When I had been in England just a fortnight I had been constantly seeking and finding excuses for postponing return-visits, with the result that the accumulation of debts of this kind was so large that it had become a heavy and depressing burden upon my conscience; then I chanced to come across, in the hotel drawing-room, a sweet and pretty and charming little maid of sixteen whom I had known in the ship, and my depressing burden became at once a prized treasure, for I borrowed this child of her mother, and at four o’clock every day thereafter we drove about London during two hours paying callsan. Never was a task so light.te We presently got the best of the list, and after that we cleared thete record every day, and kept it squaredte to date. That simple and honest and charming child made

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The luncheon with the Plasmon directorste was a business matter, and of a mutually congratulatory sort. Seven years ago I assisted in founding the Plasmon Company; I took five thousand pounds of its stock and paid par for it; it is worth eighty thousand dollars now, and will soon be worth more. Several years ago an American Plasmon Company was started, and in a little while was robbed, skinned, and reduced to bankruptcy by its own Board of Directors, one of whom—Henry A. Butters, a sharper hailing from Long Valley, California—swindled me out of my investment in it, amounting to thirty-two thousand dollarsan.

The Punch dinner will remain one of my pleasantest memories of my four weeks’ sojourn in England. That dinner was a unique distinction—itte has not had its fellow. For fifty years the Punch staff has assembledte once a week in Punch’s own quartersan, in Punch’s own private dining roomte, to dine,te and, meantime, to consider and discuss and plan and arrange the literature and art for the next week’s issue. Punch has always been hospitable to visiting foreigners of repute in the various walks of Literature and Art, and has dined and wined them;te but never until now, on his own premises; never until now, in his own private dining roomte. In fifty years I am the only stranger unto whom has been extended the privilege of crossing that sacred threshold and sitting at that sacred board. I mean to remember this.te

Punch’s Tribute to Mark Twainan

Mr. Punch does himself the honor to drink your health, sir.te

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The Punch dinner continued—Little Joy Agnew presents Mr. Clemens with original of Punch cartoon—Copy of a letter from Joy Agnew to Mr. Clemens; also copy of his reply to it.

A few days earlier Punch had contained a cartoon in which that illustrious old gentleman was represented as “doing himself the honor” to drink my health.

The full strength of the Punch staff sat at the dinner, with Mr. Agnew, the editor-in-chieftean, at the head of the table. Nearly all the men were young, and new to me—in fact all except three: Linley Sambourne, Sir Francis Burnand, and Mr. Lucyan. I had known Mr. Lucy a number of years, and Sambourne and Burnand a full generation. In these chairs had sat, fifty years ago, Leech, Tennielte, Douglas Jerroldan, and others of the great departed, and I had a sort of sense that their viewless ghosts were present and approving. When all were seated and thete napkins about to be lifted, I was warned in a low voice that a solemnity was about to take place. An impressive stillness and silence followed, which lasted as much as a minute, perhaps; then a closet door sprang open and out of it flitted a littlete fairy decked out in pink, like a rose, and came tripping toward me, her face all alive with smiles and excitement; and she bore in her hands the framed original of the Punch cartoon—a picture half as big as herself. She stopped near me, dropped a courtesy, and delivered, with charming grace and animation and well-taught expression, a touching and beautiful little speech in my honor. I took the picture from her hands, but before I could control my voice enough to even murmur a “Thank you” she had dropped another courtesy and flown to the refuge of her closet.

This is the prettiestte incident of my long life, I think,te and I cannot think of it yet without a thrill at my heart and quickened pulse-beat. The little sprite was Joy Agnew, eight years of agean, daughter of the editor-in-chiefte. Naturally she got a unanimouste recall, and so she came lightly tripping back and climbed up into her father’s lap and sat there, rosy and sweet, and altogether adorable, and lit up the whole place with her fresh young loveliness and sanctified it with her innocence. She remained half an hour;te then, under parental compulsion, she said her good-bye and was escorted away by a servant. She went reluctantly, and said she had never been allowed in that place before, and thought she wouldn’t be allowed to come again. She was the feature of that banquet, the ever-memorable feature of it, the feature without rival or competitor—Iteconfess it without jealousy.te It took a while to get over the dazzle and exaltation of that bright vision; then we pulled ourselves together and had a lively time, with speeches and other hilarities.

I think Miss Joy asked me for an autographed portrait; at any rate I sent her one, and in return she wrote me a letter worth a hundredte of it; I received it a few days after I reached home, in America. As a child’s letter, I think it is perfect; perfect in its frankness, its simplicity, and in its unquestioning and well placed confidence that I wouldte be interested in the deep concerns of the little writer’s life. I will copy her letter here. In

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Copy of letter from Professorte Henderson in regard to Mr. Clemens’s book, “What iste Man?” Mr. Clemens tells of the writing of this book, the laying of one chapter of it before the Monday Evening Club, and the final publication of two hundred and fiftyte copies by Doubleday.

I shall continue the narrative of my adventures in England pretty soon, but my interest in that matter is for the moment pushed aside by a letter which has arrived this morning from Professor Henderson. Henderson was a fellow-passenger of mine when I sailed for England in June, and after I had come to know him, and like him, and trust him, I privately and confidentially gave him a copy of “What iste Man?”an

Many a time in the past eight or nine years I have been strongly moved to publish that little book, but the doubtfulness of the wisdom of doing it has always been a little stronger than the desire to do it, consequently the venture has not been made; necessarily it has not been made, for, according to my own gospel, as set forth in that small book, where there are two desires in a man’s heart he has no choice between the two, but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

I have talked my gospel rather freely in conversation for twenty-five or thirty years, and have never much minded whether my listeners liked it or not, but I couldn’t get beyond that—the idea of actually publishing always brought me a shudder; by anticipation I couldn’t bear the reproaches which would assail me from a public which had been trained from the cradle along opposite lines of thought, and for that reason—which is a quite sufficient reason—would not be able to understand me. I had early proved all this, for I laid one chapter of my gospel before the Monday Evening Club in Hartford, a quarter of a century ago, and there was not a man there who didn’t scoff at it, jeer at it,

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The Club handled me without gloves. They said I was trying to strip man of his dignity, and I said I shouldn’t succeed, for it would not be possible to strip him of a quality which he did not possess. They said that if this insane doctrine of mine were accepted by the world life would no longer be worth living; but I said that that would merely leave life in the condition it was before.

Those were the brightest minds in Hartford—and indeed they were very superior minds—but my little batch of quite simple and unassailable truths could get no entrance into them, because the entrances were all stopped up with stupid misteachings handed down by stupid ancestors, and docilely accepted without examination, whereas until those minds should be unstopped they would not be competent to intelligently examine my gospel and intelligently pass upon it. No mind, howsoever brilliant, is in a condition to examine a proposition which is opposed to its teachings and its heredities until, as pointed out by Lord Bacon some centuries agoan, those prejudices, predilections, and inheritances shall have been swept away. I realized that night that since those able men were such children, such incompetents, in the presence of an unfamiliar doctrine, there could be but one result if my gospel should be placed before the general public: it would make not a single convert, and I should be looked upon as a lunatic, besides; therefore I put aside the idea of elaborating my notions and spreading them abroad in a book.

The sorrowful effort of that night consisted partly of a skeleton sketch, but mainly of talk. Years went by, and at last, in Vienna in 1898, I wrote out and completed one chapter, using the dialogue form in place of the essay form. I read it to Frank N. Doubleday, who was passing through Vienna, and he wanted to take it and publish itan, but I was not minded to submit it to print and criticism. I added a paragraph or a chapter now and then, as time went by, and at last in 1902 I finished it; and I further finished it, in 1904, by destroying the concluding chapter, whose subject was “The Moral Sense.” The fact is, I couldn’t even stand that chapter myself; all the other chapters were sweet and gentle, but that one was disrespectful—in fact riotousan.

Again Doubleday wanted to publish, but I remembered Hartford, and said no. He proposed a submerged and private circulation of the little torpedo, and I acceded to that. He got two hundred and fifty copies printed for mean at the De Vinne Press, and J. W. Boswell, chief of one of De Vinne’s departments, took out a copyrightte in his own name,

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The italicized phrase is from the book, where it is maintained that men often do perilous things which they don’t want to do, but are so constituted by nature that they can’t bear to leave them undone, whereas a man differently constituted could leave themte undone without any discomfort to himself. In this place I will insert Professor Henderson’s letter:

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Call upon Lady Stanley; and upon Archdeacon Wilberforce, where Holy Grail is exhibited and story of its discovery related to Mr. Clemens by the Archdeacon.

Ashcroft’s note———:

In fact, that was one of my earliest calls. Lady Stanley was as eager and impulsive as ever, and as free from any concealment of her feelings as she was when I first knew her, a proud and happy young bridean, so many years ago. Stanley has been dead three years and a half, but I think all her days and nights are spent in worship of him, and I believe he is almost as present to her as he was in life. She is an intense spiritualist, and has long lived in the atmosphere of that cult. Mrs. Myerste, her widowed sister, was the wife of the late president of the British Psychical Societyan, who was a chief among spiritualists. To me, who take no interest in other-worldlyte things, and am convinced that we know nothing whatever about them, and have been wrongly and uncourteously and contemptuously left in total ignorance of them, it is a pleasure and a refreshment to have converse with a person like Lady Stanley, who uncompromisingly believes in them; and not only believes in them but considers them important. She was as exactly and as comprehensively happy and content in her beliefs as I am in my destitution of them, and I perceived that we could exchange places and both of us be precisely as well off as we were before; for when all is said and done, the one sole condition

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I found that Stanley had left behind him an uncompleted autobiographyte. It sets forth freely and frankly the details of his childhood and youth and early manhood, and stops with his adventures in our Civil War, if I remember rightly. Lady Stanley is preparing it for publicationan, and I was surprised, and also greatly gratified, to find that she was not purposing to suppress certain facts that used to sift around in whispers in Stanley’s lifetime—to wit, that he was of humble origin and was born in a workhouse. No doubt there was a time when shete would have been glad to see these things suppressed and forgotten, but she has risen above that; she lives upon a higher and worthier plane now; she perhaps realizes that those humble beginnings are matter for pride now, when one remembers how high the peerless explorer climbed in spite of them.

I will mix my dates againan—this in order to bring into immediate juxtaposition a couple of curiosities in the way of human intellectual gymnastics. Lady Stanley believes that Stanley’s spirit is with her all the time and talks with her about her ordinary daily concerns—a thing which is to me unthinkable. I wonder if it would be unthinkable to Archdeacon Wilberforce, also? I do not know, but I imagine that that would be the case. I imagine that the Immaculate Conceptiontean, and the rest of the impossibilities recorded in the Bible, would have no difficulties for him, because in those cases he has been trained from the cradle to believe the unbelievable, and is so used to it that it comes natural and handy to him—but that kind of teaching is no preparation for acceptance of other unbelievable things, to whose examination one comes with an untwisted and unprejudiced mind. Wilberforce is educated, cultured, and has a fine and acute mind, and he comes of an ancestry similarly equipped; therefore he is competent to examine new marvels with an open mind, and I think the chances are that he rejects the claims of spiritualism with fully as much confidence as he accepts Immaculate Conceptionte. Is it possible that Mr. Wilberforce has been trained from the cradle up to believe in the Holy Grail? It does not seem likely; yet he does believe in it, and not only believes in it but believes he has it in his possession.

If I had had this astonishing fact at second-hand I could not have believed it, and would not have believed it, even if I had gotten it from the twelve apostles in writing, with every signature vouched for by a notary public. I should have said that to an educated,

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The text for what I am talking about now I find in this note of Ashcroft’s:

As soon as I entered I was told by the Archdeacon that a most remarkable event had occurred—that the long lost Holy Grail had at last been found, and that there could be no mistake whatever about its identity!te I could not have been more startled if a gun had gone off at my ear. For a moment, or at least half a moment, I supposed that he was not in earnest; then that supposition vanished; manifestly he was in earnest—indeed he was eagerly and excitedly in earnest. He leading, we plowed through the crowd to the centrete of the drawing-roomte, where Sir William Crookes, the renowned scientist, was standing. Sir William is a spiritualist. We closed in upon Sir William, Mrs. Myerste accosting me and joining us. Mr. Wilberforce then told me the rest of the story of the Holy Grail, and it was apparent that Sir William already knew all about it and was, moreover, a believer in the marvel. In brief, the story was that a young grain merchant, a Mr. Pole, had recentlyte been visited in a vision by an angel who commanded him to go to a certain place outside the ancient Glastonbury Abbey, and said that upon digging in that place he would find the Holy Grail. Mr. Pole obeyed. He sought out the indicated spot and dug there, and under four feet of packed and solid earth he found the relic. All this had happened a week or ten days before this present conversation of June 23dan.te

The Holy Grail continued.

The Holy Grail was in the house. A proper spirit of reverence forbade its exhibition to a crowd, but Mr. Wilberforce offered to grant me a private view of it, therefore I followed him and Sir William; Mrs. Myerste joined us. When we arrived at the room where the relic was,te we found there the finder of it and one other man—a guardian of the place, this latter seemed to be. Mr. Pole brought a wooden box of a quite humble and ordinary sort, and took from it a loose bundle of white linen cloth, handling it carefully, and gave it into Mr. Wilberforce’s hands, who proceeded to unwind its envelope—tenot hastily, but with cautious pains, and impressively; the pervading silence was itself impressive, and I was affected by it. Stillness and solemnity have a subduing power of their own, let the occasion be what it may. This power had time and opportunity to deepen and gather force, degree by degree, for the linen bandage was of considerable length. At last the sacred vessel which

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To be exact, it was not a cup at all; it was not a vase; it was not a goblet. It was merely a saucer—a saucer of green glass enclosing a saucer of white silver. Both surfaceste of the saucer were adorned with small flower figures in soft colors pierced with open-work, and through these piercings the imprisoned silver saucer could be seen. In size and shape and shallowness, this saucer was like any other saucer. It may have been a cup, or a beaker, or a grail, once, but if so time has shriveled it.

Mr. Wilberforce said that it was the true Holy Grail; that there was no room for the slightest doubt about it; that no vessel like it was nowte in existence anywhere; that its age could not be short of four thousand years; that its place of concealment, under four feet of solid earth, was another indication of its antiquity, since it takes many centuries to form four feet of solid earth. It was evident that Sir William Crookes, who as a scientist will accept no allegedte revelation of science until it has been submitted to the most exacting and remorseless tests—and has stood the tests and stands absolutely proven—was quite satisfied with these juvenile guessings and empty reasonings, and fully believed in the genuineness of this Holy Grail, and did not even doubt the authenticity of that angel of indigestion that brought the news to the grain-broker.

I am glad I have lived to see that half hour—that astonishing half hour. In its particular linete it stands alone in my life’s experiences; havingte no fellow, and nothing, indeed, that even remotely resembles it. I have long suspected that Man’ste claim to be The Reasoning Animalte was a doubtful one, but this episode has swept that doubtfulness away; I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s. Mrs. Myerste has lived in an atmosphere of spiritualism for many years, and subscribes to that cult’s claims, still the Holy Grail was too large a mouthful for her; she indicated this in a private remark to me.

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World’ste recent exposure of fact that Roosevelt bought his election—Remarks about Roosevelt—His proposed trip down the Mississippi—Mr. Clemens declines to join the excursion and pilot President’s boat—Copy of poem relating to this incident.

The King’s garden party at Windsor——

But never mind about that now; I will take it up when to-day’s latest and freshest and newest interest in President Roosevelt and his antics shall have had a chance to quiet down—in case he should give it one, which is not likely. Three days ago the World newspaper convicted him, beyond redemption, of having bought his election to the Presidency with money. That he committed this stupendous crime has long been suspected—ever since election day, in fact—but the proofs have never been furnished until now. Judge Parker, the opposition candidate, made the charge at the time, in courteous parliamentary terms, but Mr. Roosevelt fiercely denied it—thus adding falsehood to his burden of misconduct. However, that was not much of an addition—for him; he is accustomed to it, and has a talent for it, although he detests false speaking in other people, and cannot abide it. At one time and another, during the past three years, he has frankly charged a dozen of the cleanest men in the country with being unveracious,te and in every instance has seemed almost really and sincerely shocked at it. Mr. Roosevelt is easily the most astonishing event in American history—if we except the discovery of the country by Columbus. The details of Mr. Roosevelt’s purchase of the Presidency by bribery of voters are all exposed now, even to the names of the men who furnished the money, and the amounts which each contributedan. The men are great corporation chiefs, and three of them are Standard Oil monopolistsan. It is now known that when the canvass was over, a week before election day, and all legitimate uses for election-money at an end, Mr. Roosevelt got frightened and sent for Mr. Harriman to come to Washington and arrange measures to save the State of New York for the Republican party. The meeting took place, and Harriman was urged to raise two hundred thousand dollars for the cause. He raised two hundred and sixty thousand, and it was spent upon the election in

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Of the money subscribed, two hundred thousand dollars were spent in the City of New York, and Mr. Harriman claims that it changed the votes of fifty thousand floaters, thereby making a change in Mr. Roosevelt’s favorte of a hundred thousand votes.

For years the rich corporations have furnished vast sums of money to keep the Republican party in power, and have done this upon the understanding that their monopolies were to be shielded and protected in return. During all these years this protection has been faithfully furnished, in accordance with the agreement, but this time treachery intervened. Mr. Roosevelt saw that it would be popular to attack the great corporationsan, and he did not hesitate to retire from his contract and do it. Mr. Harriman and those others had bought him and paid for him, but that was nothing to a man who stands always ready to sell his honor for such a price as he can get for it in the market—for even ate large advertisement, for that matter.

Mr. Roosevelt is now rejoicing in the possession of a federal judge, of Chicago, who is a man after his own heart. This judge has fined the Standard Oil Company twenty-nine million two hundred and forty thousand dollars, upon a quibblean, and the President is delighted, for it is a large and showy advertisement. It is quite unlikely that a higher court will affirm the decisionan, on appeal, but the President will care little for that; he has had his advertisement.

He has sent Secretary Taft around the worldan on an electioneering trip—another advertisement.

He is sending the United States navy to San Francisco by way of the Strait of Magellan—all for show, all for advertisementan—although he is aware that if it gets disabled on its adventurous trip it cannot be repaired in the Pacific, for lack of docks; but the excursion will make a great noise, and this will satisfy Mr. Roosevelt.

Mr. Roosevelt has done what he could to destroy the industries of the country, and they all stand now in a half-wreckedte condition and waiting in an ague to see what he will do next. One more shake-up and they will go, perhaps. He will certainly provide that shake-up, if he can get a sufficient advertisement out of it. That San Francisco earthquake which shook thete city down, and made such a noise in the world, was but a poor thing, and local; it confined itself to a narrow strip of the Pacific strand, and was a poor little back-settlement thing compared with Mr. Roosevelt; he is the real earthquake, and the most colossal one in history; when he quakes he convulses the entire land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Canada to the Gulf; not even a village escapes. In six months he has reduced the value of every species of property in

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To descend to small matters: the President is about to start out on another advertising tour; two or three weeks hence he is going to review the Mississippi River—that poor old abandoned waterwayte which was my field of usefulness when I was a pilot in the days of its high prosperity, nearly fifty years ago. He will start at Cairo and go down the river on a steamboat, and make a noise all the way. He is ready to lend himself to any wildcat scheme that any one can invent for the bilking of the Treasury, provided he can get an advertisement out of it. This time he goes as cat’s paw for that ancient and insatiable gang, the Mississippi Improvement conspiratorste, who for thirty years have been annually sucking the blood of the Treasury and spending it in fantastic attempts to ameliorate the condition of that useless river—apparently that, really to feed the Republican votean out there. These efforts have never improved the river, for the reason that no effort of man can do that. The Mississippi will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise; it has always torn down the petty basket-work of the engineers and poured its giant floods whithersoever it chose, and it will continue to do this. The President’s trip is in the interest of another wasted appropriation, and the project will succeed—succeed and furnish an advertisement.

Three or four weeks ago the Mayor of Cairo invited me to come out and join the conspiracy and be a guest, but I said I couldn’t make so long a land journey at my time of life, I not being well able to endure such a strain upon my strength, and would therefore excuse myself. Memphis invited me also, and I excused myself upon the same plea. The next I heard was that I had accepted, and was going to steer the President’s boat, with my venerable boss, Bixby, standing guard over me in the pilot-house to see that I didn’t butt the boat’s brains out and leave the country “shy” of a President, as the slang phrase has it. Next appeared a wandering telegram which said I had “declined”te to pilot the President’s boatan. It was a gratuitous slur; I had made no remark which could be construed into a discourtesy to the Chief Magistrate; for the sake of my own self-respectte I would not dote that. However, some poetry has resulted—therefore I have my compensation. I love poetry—at least I love it when it advertises mean.

The trip to Jamestown Fair in Mr. Rogers’s yacht to celebrate Robert Fulton Day—Some of the details of what the program was to be, as originally planned.

I will resume the English excursion presently, but not yet, because I wish to talk now about an absurd matter which is of immediate and lively interest to me. As a sort of starting-point I will insert the following newspaper-accountte of a meeting which took place in New York yesterday evening, the 25th.

I have been having an experience which reminds me of a collapsed balloon. I once saw that kind of a balloon. It soared showily skyward, out of a sea of admiring upturned faces, and its aspect was quite sublime; its distended bulk was very impressive; then it exploded, and when it reached the ground it lay there a mere wrinkled and crinkled rag, with none so poor to do it honoran.

Since early last May a World’s Fair has been struggling along at Jamestown, Virginiaan, in commemoration of the settling of that village three hundred years ago by Englishmen—the first effort of white people to establish a colony in Americaan. The village itself has disappeared, but the event remains, and still occupies a paragraph in the histories. I went down with Mr.te H. H. Rogers, in his yacht, the Kanawha, in May,te and witnessed the opening of the Fairan. That was the President’s Day, so called, and he was there and made one of his ten thousand speeches. Since then there has been an Army Day; also a Naval Day; also a Virginia Day; also a Georgia Day, and divers other Days—the usual plan for drawing crowds to World’s Fairs in the hope of saving them from bankruptcy. Cornelius Vanderbilt is President of the Robert Fulton Monument Fund Association, and I am Vice Presidentte. I became Vice Presidentte a year or two ago upon the solicitation of Major Generalte Fred Grantan, the son of his father—a high and sufficient distinction; he has no other, but is a good man and a good citizen—virtues which not even his enemies, if he has any, will deny him. He did not earn his major-generalship, but neither did the horse-doctor, Leonard Wood, earn his; and neither did the dishonorable Funstonan earn his soiled brigadiership. However, those remarks in passing——they are not important. I stipulated that I should be merely a figurehead Vice Presidentte, with no duties to perform and nothing to do but pose; still the thing happened that has always happened in these cases—every now and then the Association has put a burden upon me, and I have wept and mourned, but have ended by carrying it.

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This stately ceremony accomplished, the yachts would come to anchor in a group off the Exposition pier, a mile from shore, and absorb breakfast; at ten o’clock I should convey my guest, and his suite, to the pier in the launch, Commodore Vanderbilt and suite following; on the pier we should be received in style by the minor officials of the Robert Fulton Association, with a military band to help; I should deliver my guest to these officials, and they in turn would deliver him to the President and chief officials of

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But hang it, it was all a dream! The entire program was built, from the ground up, out of suppositions. But I didn’t know that; I supposed that these handsome arrangements had all been actually made, not merely dreamed. As soon as I got back to Tuxedo I sent my invitation to Mr. Cleveland, at Princeton, and presently I sailed for England on my Oxford errand, and was gone until the 23dte of July. Meantime I had learned by newspaper cablegrams, in London, that Mr. Cleveland had been stricken down with an alarming illness. Mrs. Cleveland wrote me that it would now be too great a risk for Mr. Cleveland to accept; that it would probably be long before he was fully recovered from his illness.

I then discovered an astonishing thing, to wit—that Mr. Vanderbilt had gone to Europe without sending the invitation to Mr. Cleveland, therefore I had offered transportation to him when he had not been invited to go and couldn’t know whether he was going to need any transportation or not. It also transpired, presently, that when the invitation did go to Mr. Cleveland it went by mail, under a two-cent stamp, instead of being carried to him by an officer of the Association, or by some other properly qualified envoy. To treat an ex-president of the United States in this way was not merely shabby, it was indecent.

Very well, our orator had failed, the breaking down and disintegrating of our grandeurs had begun—begun never to stop. As the 22dte of September drew fatefully near, and nearer, and still nearer, detail after detail of our great program crumbled away; toward the last Mr. Dearborn said it seemed impossible to secure an orator, and therefore it would now become a Mark Twain Day in spite of anything that could be done to prevent it—therefore I might as well take upon myself the oratorship; in fact I mustte do it. But I said “No.” I said if they could get an orator I wouldn’t give him

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Robertte Fulton Day concluded.te

It was Mr. Littleton, of New Yorkan. I feel sure he will not remain unknown; I shall watch his career with interest. He is young, but he will get over that; it is a point in his favor.

On the 21st we heard a rumor that the seventeen yachts were not going. It turned out later that this was true; true also that President Vanderbilt, of the Fulton Association, had forgotten to invite them. It was also said that he could have had twenty for the asking. At noon on the 22dte Harry and his wife and I were on board and ready. We did not ask for orders, that being Mr. Vanderbilt’s affair, not ours. Mr. Dearborn’s secretary presently sent us word that the North Star would sail at two o’clock, but that Commodore Vanderbilt would not be able to go in her; that I was now ad interimte President of the Fund Association and would have to act in Mr. Vanderbilt’s place, and be chairman at the functions in Jamestown and introduce the speakers at the Auditorium in the daytime, and at the banquet at night. To this was added the information that this course had been determined at a meeting of the Fund officials by unanimous vote. This did not disturb me, for I would not have to act as chairman unless I wished to do it—and of course I should not wish to do it, and would therefore appoint another official to occupy that place.

The humors of the situation were growing: the fleet had shrunk from nineteen sail to two; its Commodore had taken to the woods, and it had no head; the much advertised gay festival had turned into a funeral, and the Commodore was sending his yacht to it as kings send an empty carriage to represent them at the obsequies of a distinguished servant.

The North Star sailed at two in the afternoon, and we followed at half pastte six. The North Star was slow, and it was our purpose to overtake her in the neighborhood of Old Point Comfort; but her slowness was beyond computation by our arithmetic, whereforete we passed her at two in the morning. We arrived off the Fair, and cast anchor at 10.25te in the forenoon, and the North Star arrived a couple of hours later. She had had no instructions and didn’t know where to anchor, so she took up a position at such a distance that she hardly seemed to be a part of the marine display—by this large phrase I mean the display afforded by two war-ships, a pair of little black cheese-box models of Ericsson’s Monitor,an and the Kanawha. That part of the originalte program which was to afford us the spectacle of a double line of majestic battleshipste stretching toward the horizon and fading into spectral forms in the distance, had shrunk to this wee little handful of floaters. The question was, should the Kanawha form up in line of battle now and sail in state, and clothed in flags, up the lane formed by the pair of white war-ships, or would that

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Properly it was a sad occasion, but there was no sadness in the air; properly Robert Fulton’s Festival had turned itself into a funeral, and there ought to have been some tears, but none were shed. The most moving thing, the most uplifting thing, the most eloquent thing in the world, is perfectionte. We are always moved by the perfect thing, let it be what it may. Perfect beauty moves us; perfect ugliness moves us just as surely; perfect music satisfies us; perfect discord delights us; perfect grandeur, perfect majesty, perfect sublimity, always thrill and exaltte and contentte us—and when you suddenly turn these threete into an utterly and grotesquely perfect satire upon them, our happy souls are steeped in a drunken delight. After all the noise, all the advertising, all the gorgeous promises and anticipations, the great Robert Fulton Day had withered to this—a collapsed balloon, a prone and wrinkled rag. When I had grasped the whole matchless perfection of the failure, I was glad to be there, and would not have been elsewhere for anything.

In order that nothing might be lacking that could contribute to the splendor of the fiasco, the central day for the annual equinoctial tempest had been selected for Fulton Day. Black clouds came flocking in from the ocean and swept in ragged squadrons across the sky, heralded and accompanied by fierce lightnings and crashing thunders and deluges of rain. There was to have been a return visit to the Brooklyn; it had to be given up. There was to have been a luncheon at one o’clock on shore; it had to be given up. The oratory at the Auditorium was postponed until three o’clock, in the hope that the heavy seas might moderate sufficiently, by that time, to let us go ashore; it was not to be. At three, the seas were still so high that we could not be ferried ashore in an ordinary yachting launch and escape a thorough drenching; but at half pastte three a large governmentte launch came for us and we managed to board it without breaking our necks. When we reached the Auditorium, at four, the audience had been waiting an hour and a half. I introducedAdmiral Harrington; Robert Fulton Cutting consented to introduce the othersan, and in due course the function was over. Harry and my adoptive niece, his wifean, went back to the yacht and I supposed they would consult their comfort andte stay there, but they didn’t; they came to the banquet at eight in the evening. If Mr. Vanderbilt had had some of their spirit—however, he hadn’t.te

The perfections continued. Fulton’s boat, the Clermontan, was to have been reproduced in fireworks—one of the grand spectacles of the occasion; it didn't happen. The banquet was to have been in the great banqueting hallte of the Chamberlintean, at Old Point Comfort; it didn’t happen. It happened in the New York Building, on the Fair grounds, in a room which was full when two hundred guests sat down. There was a brilliant speech by Mrs. McLeanan, President Generalte of the Daughters of the Revolution, and I replied to it. Other speeches followed; there was a deal of hearty jollity, and everybody had a good time. That function over, Robert Fulton Day was ended—the most extraordinary day of its

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The military review had been removed from the program days and days before—a happy inspiration, for if the soldiers had attempted one they would have been drowned. Major Generalte Fred Grant telegraphed from New York that he was sick and couldn’t come; Commodore Vanderbilt sent word that he was obliged to remain in New York on a matter of business of international importance.

Now look at that shrinkage! Six months before, we had set out with a prospective ex-President of the United States, a Major Generalte in command of the Atlantic Department, a marine great gun in the person of the Commodore of the New York yacht fleet, a passage in state between a mile of foreign and domestic battleshipste clothed in bunting and vomitingte fire and smoke and thunder; also we were to have a military review and fireworkste, and a grand banquet, and as grand a ball—and behold, here was the result! Fulton Day was over and we hadn’t had a damned thing!

Mr. Vanderbilt, that weak sister, had backed out because he was afraid to face those audiences and introduce the speakers, he being inexperienced and timid in such situations. Partly that—but mainly because he was afraid to face a fiasco.te When he said he must be in New York on the 23dte in the interest of a matter of international importance, he knew it wasn’t so. The matter of international importance was a meeting of the New York Yacht Club to discuss Sir Thomas Lipton’s challenge. In the first place, it was not at allte a matter of international importance, and, in the second place, he knew that the meeting was not to take place until the 25th. The race for the America’s Cup is in some small sense an international matter, but in an exceedingly small sense. It interests thete one-hundredth fractionte of 1 per centte of the population of England and America—these being rich sporting men—and stops there; it inflammatorilyte interests nobody else, and is of not the least value in any substantial way to our nation.te As will be seen by reference to the newspaper clipping at the head of this chapter, it is nothing but a “freak” race, and a quite trifling matter. On the other hand, the Robert Fulton Centennial waste a matter of international importance; and it was far more than that—it was a matter of planetary importance. That Centennial commemorates much the largest event in American history; the results proceeding from it have been more far-reaching, and will be more lasting, than those proceeding from any other event in our history. Our next greatest day is Independence Day, but Independence Day is temporary, whereas Robert Fulton Day is permanent. We are drifting steadily toward monarchy; we have been drifting slowly toward it for thirty years, and now, by help of Mr. Roosevelt, we may be said to be flying toward it; he has hastened the day; it will come—and when it comes, Independence Day will be removed from the national calendar—but Robert Fulton Day will remain, and not only upon our calendar, but upon the calendar of the world, and there it will abide for ages. Mr. Vanderbilt regards a “freak” race as a matter of international importance, and as of more importance than Robert Fulton Day. The innocent mante has furnished us his own measure.

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The King’s garden party at Windsor.

Let us get back to England.

Mr. Ashcroft’s note:

The garden party at Windsor was a striking spectacle, and I was sharply reminded of it when I witnessed that memorable show, the Oxford Pageant, four days later—for the garden party itself was like a histrionic scene acted in the open air. When they repeat the Oxford Pageant, a thousand years from now, this garden party can be added to it with advantage—particularly if this part of the pageant shall be transferred to Windsor and exhibited upon that more spacious stage, for nine thousand finely dressed men and women must take part in it, and room will be needed. There will be plenty of it; there would be abundance of room for a hundred thousand, in those far-spreading lawns; also towering out of the lawns like a Gibraltar will be the vast bulkte of the Castle, the most imposing and majestic pile of picturesque old architecture in Great Britain—an effect not to be lightly regarded. If it should chance to be mainly a ruin, in that distant day, the effect will rather gain than lose by that circumstance; already it is populous with the ghosts of seven centuries of English monarchs, and one cannot look at it without drifting into dreams of the bygone ages and in fancy seeing the robed and sceptred spectreste flit dimly by the windows—and here, present in the flesh, was Edward VII,te the latest of the line and the completion of the dreams to date, a fact which powerfully reinforced the impressiveness of the vision by concreting it into a reality, to a certain degree.

The multitude floated hither and thither over the sward, in groups and squadrons, making a gay and ever-changing color-scheme very beautiful to look upon. The first friendte I chanced upon was the premier of England, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and in his company I wandered through the crowds for an hour, shaking hands right and left with strangers, and with an astonishing number of men and women whom I had known in earlier years—some as long ago as thirty-five. I had not supposed I knew so many. Among the oldest of these friends was Ellen Terry. She is fifty-nine, and with her was her new husbandan, aged thirty-four. She came charging down upon me with both hands extended, and looking as young as her husband, and twice as vivacious. I had known her thirty-five years; the first meeting was at a large dinner partyte at Mr. Bateman’s house—the father of the “Bateman Children.”te I used to see that pair of pretty littlete girls frequently in St. Louis, in 1858an, when their precocious acting was crowding the theatre nightly with charmed and worshiping admirers. At that time one of them was eleven years old, the other thirteen; they were beautiful little creatures, and a delight to look

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Henry Irving was present at that dinner partyte at Mr. Bateman’s house. He had recently been promoted from comedy to tragedy. The promotion came about in a curious way, if the legend of the day was correct: Irving was a very popular comedian, and had never aspired to tragedy; he was a member of Bateman’s company; for a good many years it had been the dream of Bateman’s life to appear on the stage in high tragedy, but his managerste would never allow him to do it; but he was his own manager now, and proprietor of a theatre, and he made up his mind to make the attempt. He chose as his venture either “The Bells” or “The Lyons Mail”—“The Bells,” I think. He studied the part, advertised it widely—then, almost at the last moment, his courage vanished, and he gave up the project. He astonished Irving by asking him to take his placean. Irving reluctantly consented, mastered the part in the brief time at his disposal, achieved a triumph, and never played anything but tragedy afterward, at least as a steady diet.

At the garden party, when the time came for presentations, the King and Queen stood in the shelter of a gay pavilion, and back of them were grouped His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught and his heir; the King of Siam and his heiran; and some other great personages and ladies of the court. The public were solidly massed in a semicircle in front of the pavilion, with a grassy space, ten yards wide, between them and it. Ambassador Reid presented me to the King, who shook hands with me cordially—“courteously,” the newspapers said, a word not well chosen, for the King is a man who would not know how to be otherwise than courteous to anybody, therefore the word was quite unliterarily superfluous. One newspaper said I patted histe Majesty on the shoulder—an impertinence of which I was not guilty; I was reared in the most exclusive circles of Missouri, and I know how to behave. The King rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two, while we were chatting, but he did it of his own accord. A newspaper said I recounted a funny incident of sixteen years before, when I met the King—then Prince of Wales—several times at Homburg. That was incorrect; it was the King that mentioned the funny incident, not I; and I didn’t recount it; it was not necessary to recount it, for he evidently remembered it well enough, and I didn’t need to refresh my memory about it. I dictated it more than a year ago, and it will be found, some day, in its place in this Autobiography.

When I turned to speak with the Queen I had my hat in my hand, of course—I would not accost any lady with my hat on; such conduct is not permitted in America, and I had my American manners with me. The newspaper which said I talked with herte Majesty with my hat onan, spoke the truth, but my reasons for doing it were good and sufficient—in fact unassailable. Rain was threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the Queen said, “Prayte put your hat on, Mr. Clemens.” I begged her pardon, and excused myself from doing it. After a moment or two she said, “Mr. Clemens, put your hat on”—with a slight emphasis on the word “on”—“I can’t allow you to catch cold here.” When a beautiful queen commands, it is a pleasure to obey, and this time I obeyed—but I had already disobeyed once, which is more than a Britishte subject would have felt justified in doing;

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H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught introduced himself to me, then introduced the Prince his son, and afterward the King of Siam and his heir.te

The journey to Liverpool with Tay Pay, and the Lord Mayor’s banquet in the eveningan—Copy of the speech by Tay Pay, and extract from Mr. Clemens’s reply to it.

My industries in England began at Tilbury, with the reporters at eight in the morning on the 18th of June, and continued without a break until midnight, the 10th of July.

Ashcroft’s note:

Tay Pay is Irish for T. P., and is a pet name familiar to the British nation; it is short for T. P. O’Connor, M.P. He is a gifted and charming Irishman, and has for many years represented Liverpool in the House of Commons, and is likely to continue to represent it while he lives. He had been invited by the Lord Mayor to introduce me, and we made the trip together—in quite unusual comfortan, too, for his lordship had secured from the railway companyte for my use in going and returning the special car which it has provided for the Prince of Wales. I had not seen so satisfactory a car before, and am not likely to see its like again. It had one sumptuous bed-chamberte, and another bed-chamberte less sumptuous—the latter for servants, and beyond it a place for baggage; it also had a parlor and a dining roomte. We reached Liverpool a little after four in the afternoon, and I rested in bed until it was time to go to the banquet. The Lord Mayor was admirably hospitable; he sent his state carriage for me, with a most gorgeously clad captain and crew, consisting of coachman and footmen; and he received me at the municipalte palace in his state costume, with his sword at his side and his cocked hat in his hand. I like these large attentions.te The banquet was just over when he conducted me into the banqueting hallte, so the speech-making began at oncean. After the usual toasts to the King and the President, and the reading of the usual letters and telegrams, the rest of the business of the evening was proceeded with. I copy from the newspaperan: