I belong in Cleveland, Ohio. One winter's night, two years ago, I

reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and the first

thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest boyhood friend

and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before, and that his

last utterance had been a desire that I would take his remains home to

his poor old father and mother in Wisconsin. I was greatly shocked and

grieved, but there was no time to waste in emotions; I must start at

once. I took the card, marked "Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem,

Wisconsin," and hurried off through the whistling storm to the railway

station. Arrived there I found the long white-pine box which had been

described to me; I fastened the card to it with some tacks, saw it put

safely aboard the express car, and then ran into the eating-room to

provide myself with a sandwich and some cigars. When I returned,

presently, there was my coffin-box back again, apparently, and a young

fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and

a hammer! I was astonished and puzzled. He began to nail on his card,

and I rushed out to the express car, in a good deal of a state of mind,

to ask for an explanation. But no--there was my box, all right, in the

express car; it hadn't been disturbed. [The fact is that without my

suspecting it a prodigious mistake had been made. I was carrying off a

box of guns which that young fellow had come to the station to ship to a

rifle company in Peoria, Illinois, and he had got my corpse!] Just then

the conductor sung out "All aboard," and I jumped into the express car

and got a comfortable seat on a bale of buckets. The expressman was

there, hard at work,--a plain man of fifty, with a simple, honest,

good-natured face, and a breezy, practical heartiness in his general

style. As the train moved off a stranger skipped into the car and set a

package of peculiarly mature and capable Limburger cheese on one end of

my coffin-box--I mean my box of guns. That is to say, I know now that it

was Limburger cheese, but at that time I never had heard of the article

in my life, and of course was wholly ignorant of its character. Well, we

sped through the wild night, the bitter storm raged on, a cheerless

misery stole over me, my heart went down, down, down! The old expressman

made a brisk remark or two about the tempest and the arctic weather,

slammed his sliding doors to, and bolted them, closed his window down

tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting

things to rights, and all the time contentedly humming "Sweet By and By,"

in a low tone, and flatting a good deal. Presently I began to detect a

most evil and searching odor stealing about on the frozen air. This

depressed my spirits still more, because of course I attributed it to my

poor departed friend. There was something infinitely saddening about his

calling himself to my remembrance in this dumb pathetic way, so it was

hard to keep the tears back. Moreover, it distressed me on account of

the old expressman, who, I was afraid, might notice it. However, he went

humming tranquilly on, and gave no sign; and for this I was grateful.

Grateful, yes, but still uneasy; and soon I began to feel more and more

uneasy every minute, for every minute that went by that odor thickened up

the more, and got to be more and more gamey and hard to stand. Presently,

having got things arranged to his satisfaction, the expressman got some

wood and made up a tremendous fire in his stove.

This distressed me more than I can tell, for I could not but feel that it

was a mistake. I was sure that the effect would be deleterious upon my

poor departed friend. Thompson--the expressman's name was Thompson, as I

found out in the course of the night--now went poking around his car,

stopping up whatever stray cracks he could find, remarking that it didn't

make any difference what kind of a night it was outside, he calculated to

make us comfortable, anyway. I said nothing, but I believed he was not

choosing the right way. Meantime he was humming to himself just as

before; and meantime, too, the stove was getting hotter and hotter, and

the place closer and closer. I felt myself growing pale and qualmish,

but grieved in silence and said nothing.

Soon I noticed that the "Sweet By and By" was gradually fading out; next

it ceased altogether, and there was an ominous stillness. After a few

moments Thompson said,

"Pfew! I reckon it ain't no cinnamon 't I've loaded up thish-yer stove

with!"

He gasped once or twice, then moved toward the cof--gun-box, stood over

that Limburger cheese part of a moment, then came back and sat down near

me, looking a good deal impressed. After a contemplative pause, he said,

indicating the box with a gesture,

"Friend of yourn?"

"Yes," I said with a sigh.

"He's pretty ripe, ain't he!"

Nothing further was said for perhaps a couple of minutes, each being busy

with his own thoughts; then Thompson said, in a low, awed voice,

"Sometimes it's uncertain whether they're really gone or not,--seem gone,

you know--body warm, joints limber--and so, although you think they're

gone, you don't really know. I've had cases in my car. It's perfectly

awful, becuz you don't know what minute they'll rise up and look at you!"

Then, after a pause, and slightly lifting his elbow toward the box,

--"But he ain't in no trance! No, sir, I go bail for him!"

We sat some time, in meditative silence, listening to the wind and the

roar of the train; then Thompson said, with a good deal of feeling,

"Well-a-well, we've all got to go, they ain't no getting around it. Man

that is born of woman is of few days and far between, as Scriptur' says.

Yes, you look at it any way you want to, it's awful solemn and cur'us:

they ain't nobody can get around it; all's got to go--just everybody, as

you may say. One day you're hearty and strong"--here he scrambled to his

feet and broke a pane and stretched his nose out at it a moment or two,

then sat down again while I struggled up and thrust my nose out at the

same place, and this we kept on doing every now and then--"and next day

he's cut down like the grass, and the places which knowed him then knows

him no more forever, as Scriptur' says. Yes'ndeedy, it's awful solemn

and cur'us; but we've all got to go, one time or another; they ain't no

getting around it."

There was another long pause; then,--

"What did he die of?"

I said I didn't know.

"How long has he ben dead?"

It seemed judicious to enlarge the facts to fit the probabilities; so I

said,

"Two or three days."

But it did no good; for Thompson received it with an injured look which

plainly said, "Two or three years, you mean." Then he went right along,

placidly ignoring my statement, and gave his views at considerable length

upon the unwisdom of putting off burials too long. Then he lounged off

toward the box, stood a moment, then came back on a sharp trot and

visited the broken pane, observing,

"'Twould 'a' ben a dum sight better, all around, if they'd started him

along last summer."

Thompson sat down and buried his face in his red silk handkerchief, and

began to slowly sway and rock his body like one who is doing his best to

endure the almost unendurable. By this time the fragrance--if you may

call it fragrance--was just about suffocating, as near as you can come at

it. Thompson's face was turning gray; I knew mine hadn't any color left

in it. By and by Thompson rested his forehead in his left hand, with his

elbow on his knee, and sort of waved his red handkerchief towards the box

with his other hand, and said,--

"I've carried a many a one of 'em,--some of 'em considerable overdue,

too,--but, lordy, he just lays over 'em all!--and does it easy Cap., they

was heliotrope to HIM!"

This recognition of my poor friend gratified me, in spite of the sad

circumstances, because it had so much the sound of a compliment.

Pretty soon it was plain that something had got to be done. I suggested

cigars. Thompson thought it was a good idea. He said,

"Likely it'll modify him some."

We puffed gingerly along for a while, and tried hard to imagine that

things were improved. But it wasn't any use. Before very long, and

without any consultation, both cigars were quietly dropped from our

nerveless fingers at the same moment. Thompson said, with a sigh,

"No, Cap., it don't modify him worth a cent. Fact is, it makes him

worse, becuz it appears to stir up his ambition. What do you reckon we

better do, now?"

I was not able to suggest anything; indeed, I had to be swallowing and

swallowing, all the time, and did not like to trust myself to speak.

Thompson fell to maundering, in a desultory and low-spirited way, about

the miserable experiences of this night; and he got to referring to my

poor friend by various titles,--sometimes military ones, sometimes civil

ones; and I noticed that as fast as my poor friend's effectiveness grew,

Thompson promoted him accordingly,--gave him a bigger title. Finally he

said,

"I've got an idea. Suppos' n we buckle down to it and give the Colonel a

bit of a shove towards t'other end of the car?--about ten foot, say. He

wouldn't have so much influence, then, don't you reckon?"

I said it was a good scheme. So we took in a good fresh breath at the

broken pane, calculating to hold it till we got through; then we went

there and bent over that deadly cheese and took a grip on the box.

Thompson nodded "All ready," and then we threw ourselves forward with all

our might; but Thompson slipped, and slumped down with his nose on the

cheese, and his breath got loose. He gagged and gasped, and floundered

up and made a break for the door, pawing the air and saying hoarsely,

"Don't hender me! --gimme the road! I'm a-dying; gimme the road!"

Out on the cold platform I sat down and held his head a while, and he

revived. Presently he said,

"Do you reckon we started the Gen'rul any?"

I said no; we hadn't budged him.

"Well, then, that idea's up the flume. We got to think up something

else. He's suited wher' he is, I reckon; and if that's the way he feels

about it, and has made up his mind that he don't wish to be disturbed,

you bet he's a-going to have his own way in the business. Yes, better

leave him right wher' he is, long as he wants it so; becuz he holds all

the trumps, don't you know, and so it stands to reason that the man that

lays out to alter his plans for him is going to get left."

But we couldn't stay out there in that mad storm; we should have frozen

to death. So we went in again and shut the door, and began to suffer

once more and take turns at the break in the window. By and by, as we

were starting away from a station where we had stopped a moment Thompson.

pranced in cheerily, and exclaimed,

"We're all right, now! I reckon we've got the Commodore this time. I

judge I've got the stuff here that'll take the tuck out of him."

It was carbolic acid. He had a carboy of it. He sprinkled it all around

everywhere; in fact he drenched everything with it, rifle-box, cheese and

all. Then we sat down, feeling pretty hopeful. But it wasn't for long.

You see the two perfumes began to mix, and then--well, pretty soon we

made a break for the door; and out there Thompson swabbed his face with

his bandanna and said in a kind of disheartened way,

"It ain't no use. We can't buck agin him. He just utilizes everything

we put up to modify him with, and gives it his own flavor and plays it

back on us. Why, Cap., don't you know, it's as much as a hundred times

worse in there now than it was when he first got a-going. I never did

see one of 'em warm up to his work so, and take such a dumnation interest

in it. No, Sir, I never did, as long as I've ben on the road; and I've

carried a many a one of 'em, as I was telling you."

We went in again after we were frozen pretty stiff; but my, we couldn't

stay in, now. So we just waltzed back and forth, freezing, and thawing,

and stifling, by turns. In about an hour we stopped at another station;

and as we left it Thompson came in with a bag, and said,--

"Cap., I'm a-going to chance him once more,--just this once; and if we

don't fetch him this time, the thing for us to do, is to just throw up

the sponge and withdraw from the canvass. That's the way I put it up."

He had brought a lot of chicken feathers, and dried apples, and leaf

tobacco, and rags, and old shoes, and sulphur, and asafoetida, and one

thing or another; and he, piled them on a breadth of sheet iron in the

middle of the floor, and set fire to them.

When they got well started, I couldn't see, myself, how even the corpse

could stand it. All that went before was just simply poetry to that

smell,--but mind you, the original smell stood up out of it just as

sublime as ever,--fact is, these other smells just seemed to give it a

better hold; and my, how rich it was! I didn't make these reflections

there--there wasn't time--made them on the platform. And breaking for

the platform, Thompson got suffocated and fell; and before I got him

dragged out, which I did by the collar, I was mighty near gone myself.

When we revived, Thompson said dejectedly,--

"We got to stay out here, Cap. We got to do it. They ain't no other

way. The Governor wants to travel alone, and he's fixed so he can

outvote us."

And presently he added,

"And don't you know, we're pisoned. It's our last trip, you can make up

your mind to it. Typhoid fever is what's going to come of this. I feel

it acoming right now. Yes, sir, we're elected, just as sure as you're

born."

We were taken from the platform an hour later, frozen and insensible, at

the next station, and I went straight off into a virulent fever, and

never knew anything again for three weeks. I found out, then, that I had

spent that awful night with a harmless box of rifles and a lot of

innocent cheese; but the news was too late to save me; imagination had

done its work, and my health was permanently shattered; neither Bermuda

nor any other land can ever bring it back tome. This is my last trip; I

am on my way home to die.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

MARK TWAIN'S SPEECHES

by Mark Twain

CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

THE STORY OF A SPEECH

PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS

COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES

BOOKS, AUTHORS, AND HATS

DEDICATION SPEECH

DIE SCHRECKEN DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE.

THE HORRORS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

GERMAN FOR THE HUNGARIANS

A NEW GERMAN WORD

UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

THE WEATHER

THE BABIES

OUR CHILDREN AND GREAT DISCOVERIES

EDUCATING THEATRE-GOERS

THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE

POETS AS POLICEMEN

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON DRAMATIZED

DALY THEATRE

THE DRESS OF CIVILIZED WOMAN

DRESS REFORM AND COPYRIGHT

COLLEGE GIRLS

GIRLS

THE LADIES

WOMAN'S PRESS CLUB

VOTES FOR WOMEN

WOMAN-AN OPINION

ADVICE TO GIRLS

TAXES AND MORALS

TAMMANY AND CROKER

MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT

CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL MORALS

LAYMAN'S SERMON

UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT SOCIETY

PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP

COURAGE

THE DINNER TO MR. CHOATE

ON STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE

HENRY M. STANLEY

DINNER TO MR. JEROME

HENRY IRVING

DINNER TO HAMILTON W. MABIE

INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY

DINNER TO WHITELAW REID

ROGERS AND RAILROADS

THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER

SOCIETY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

READING-ROOM OPENING

LITERATURE

DISAPPEARANCE OF LITERATURE

THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB DINNER

THE ALPHABET AND SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

SPELLING AND PICTURES

BOOKS AND BURGLARS

AUTHORS' CLUB

BOOKSELLERS

"MARK TWAIN's FIRST APPEARANCE"

MORALS AND MEMORY

QUEEN VICTORIA

JOAN OF ARC

ACCIDENT INSURANCE--ETC.

OSTEOPATHY

WATER-SUPPLY

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

CATS AND CANDY

OBITUARY POETRY

CIGARS AND TOBACCO

BILLIARDS

THE UNION RIGHT OR WRONG?

AN IDEAL FRENCH ADDRESS

STATISTICS

GALVESTON ORPHAN BAZAAR

SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

CHARITY AND ACTORS

RUSSIAN REPUBLIC

RUSSIAN SUFFERERS

WATTERSON AND TWAIN AS REBELS

ROBERT FULTON FUND

FULTON DAY, JAMESTOWN

LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF MARK TWAIN

COPYRIGHT

IN AID OF THE BLIND

DR. MARK TWAIN, FARMEOPATH

MISSOURI UNIVERSITY SPEECH

BUSINESS

CARNEGIE THE BENEFACTOR

ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE

WELCOME HOME

AN UNDELIVERED SPEECH

SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

TO THE WHITEFRIARS

THE ASCOT GOLD CUP

THE SAVAGE CLUB DINNER

GENERAL MILES AND THE DOG

WHEN IN DOUBT, TELL THE TRUTH

THE DAY WE CELEBRATE

INDEPENDENCE DAY

AMERICANS AND THE ENGLISH

ABOUT LONDON

PRINCETON

THE ST. LOUIS HARBOR-BOAT "MARK TWAIN"

SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

INTRODUCTION

These speeches will address themselves to the minds and hearts of those

who read them, but not with the effect they had with those who heard

them; Clemens himself would have said, not with half the effect. I have

noted elsewhere how he always held that the actor doubled the value of

the author's words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author.

He was a most consummate actor, with this difference from other actors,

that he was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to

which his voice and action gave the color of life. Representation is the

art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative; it

was nothing at second hand.

I never heard Clemens speak when I thought he quite failed; some burst

or spurt redeemed him when he seemed flagging short of the goal, and,

whoever else was in the running, he came in ahead. His near-failures

were the error of a rare trust to the spontaneity in which other speakers

confide, or are believed to confide, when they are on their feet. He

knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for

the silence and solitude of the closet where he mused his words to an

imagined audience; that this was the use of orators from Demosthenes and

Cicero up and down. He studied every word and syllable, and memorized

them by a system of mnemonics peculiar to himself, consisting of an

arbitrary arrangement of things on a table--knives, forks, salt-cellars;

inkstands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand--which stood for points

and clauses and climaxes, and were at once indelible diction and constant

suggestion. He studied every tone and every gesture, and he forecast the

result with the real audience from its result with that imagined

audience. Therefore, it was beautiful to see him and to hear him; he

rejoiced in the pleasure he gave and the blows of surprise which he

dealt; and because he had his end in mind, he knew when to stop.

I have been talking of his method and manner; the matter the reader has

here before him; and it is good matter, glad, honest, kind, just.

W. D. HOWELLS.

PREFACE

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION OF "MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES"

If I were to sell the reader a barrel of molasses, and he, instead of

sweetening his substantial dinner with the same at judicious intervals,

should eat the entire barrel at one sitting, and then abuse me for making

him sick, I would say that he deserved to be made sick for not knowing

any better how to utilize the blessings this world affords. And if I

sell to the reader this volume of nonsense, and he, instead of seasoning

his graver reading with a chapter of it now and then, when his mind

demands such relaxation, unwisely overdoses himself with several chapters

of it at a single sitting, he will deserve to be nauseated, and he will

have nobody to blame but himself if he is. There is no more sin in

publishing an entire volume of nonsense than there is in keeping a

candy-store with no hardware in it. It lies wholly with the customer

whether he will injure himself by means of either, or will derive from

them the benefits which they will afford him if he uses their

possibilities judiciously.

Respectfully submitted,

THE AUTHOR.

MARK TWAIN'S SPEECHES

THE STORY OF A SPEECH

An address delivered in 1877, and a review of it twenty-nine

years later. The original speech was delivered at a dinner

given by the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly in honor of the

seventieth anniversary o f the birth of John Greenleaf

Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877.

This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant

reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I will drop lightly

into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic and

contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a

thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded

in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose

spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly Californiaward. I started an

inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow

and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'.

I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin

in the foot-hills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at

the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door

to me. When he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than

before. He let me in--pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the

customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, I took a pipe.

This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he

spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "You're

the fourth--I'm going to move." "The fourth what?" said I. "The fourth

littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move."

"You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others?" "Mr. Longfellow,

Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!"

You can, easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot

whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he:

"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in of

course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot,

but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot.

Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was

as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double

chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a

prizefighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig

made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down, his face, like a

finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see

that. And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin,

then he took me by the buttonhole, and says he:

"'Through the deep caves of thought

I hear a voice that sings,

Build thee more stately mansions,

O my soul!'

"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.'

Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that

way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson

came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole

and says:

"'Give me agates for my meat;

Give me cantharids to eat;

From air and ocean bring me foods,

From all zones and altitudes.'

"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.'

You see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery swells.

But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and

buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he:

"'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!

You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'

"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll

be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get

this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after they'd filled up

I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it, and then he fires up all of a

sudden and yells:

"Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!

For I would drink to other days.'

"By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was

getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, 'Looky

here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows

herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.' Them's the very

words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass such famous littery

people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing

onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my

tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's

different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whiskey

straight or you'll go dry.' Well, between drinks they'd swell around the

cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a

greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on

trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson

dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says:

"'I am the doubter and the doubt--'

and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout.

Says he:

"'They reckon ill who leave me out;

They know not well the subtle ways I keep.

I pass and deal again!'

Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! Oh, he was a cool one!

Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a

sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had already

corralled two tricks, and each of the others one. So now he kind of

lifts a little in his chair and says:

"'I tire of globes and aces!

Too long the game is played!'

--and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as

pie and says:

"'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

For the lesson thou hast taught,'

--and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! Emerson claps

his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went

under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes

rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the

first man that draws, I'll lay down on him and smother him!' All quiet

on the Potomac, you bet!

"They were pretty how-come-you-so' by now, and they begun to blow.

Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie."'

Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Biglow Papers."' Says Holmes,

'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both.' They mighty near ended in a fight.

Then they wished they had some more company--and Mr. Emerson pointed to

me and says:

"'Is yonder squalid peasant all

That this proud nursery could breed?'

He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir,

next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so

they made me stand up and sing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" till I

dropped-at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've

been through, my friend. When I woke at seven, they were leaving, thank

goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his'n under his

arm. Says I, 'Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with

them?' He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em; because:

"'Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime;

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.'

"As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and I'm

going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere."

I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious

singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these

were impostors."

The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "Ah!

impostors, were they? Are you?"

I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not travelled on my

'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved to

contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the

details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I

believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular

fact on an occasion like this.

.........................

From Mark Twain's Autobiography.

January 11, 1906.

Answer to a letter received this morning:

DEAR MRS. H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that

curious passage in my life. During the first year or, two after it

happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were

so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled,

established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my

mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have

lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse,

vulgar, and destitute of humor. But your suggestion that you and

your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to

look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to

delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy

of it.

It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am

not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously

funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy.

What I have said to Mrs. H. is true. I did suffer during a year or two

from the deep humiliations of that episode. But at last, in 1888, in

Venice, my wife and I came across Mr. and Mrs. A. P. C., of Concord,

Massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing but

death terminates. The C.'s were very bright people and in every way

charming and companionable. We were together a month or two in Venice

and several months in Rome, afterward, and one day that lamented break of

mine was mentioned. And when I was on the point of lathering those

people for bringing it to my mind when I had gotten the memory of it

almost squelched, I perceived with joy that the C.'s were indignant about

the way that my performance had been received in Boston. They poured out

their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty attitude of the

people who were present at that performance, and about the Boston

newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the matter.

That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief, beyond

imagination. Very well; I had accepted that as a fact for a year or two,

and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of it

--which was not frequently, if I could help it. Whenever I thought of it

I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so unholy a thing.

Well, the C.'s comforted me, but they did not persuade me to continue to

think about the unhappy episode. I resisted that. I tried to get it out

of my mind, and let it die, and I succeeded. Until Mrs. H.'s letter

came, it had been a good twenty-five years since I had thought of that

matter; and when she said that the thing was funny I wondered if possibly

she might be right. At any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and I wrote

to Boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth.

I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly I can see

a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at tables

feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. I don't know who

they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and

facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling;

Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his

face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face;

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all

good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being

turned toward the light first one way and then another--a charming man,

and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting

still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to

other people). I can see those figures with entire distinctness across

this abyss of time.

One other feature is clear--Willie Winter (for these past thousand years

dramatic editor of the New York Tribune, and still occupying that high

post in his old age) was there. He was much younger then than he is now,

and he showed 'it. It was always a pleasure to me to see Willie Winter

at a banquet. During a matter of twenty years I was seldom at a banquet

where Willie Winter was not also present, and where he did not read a

charming poem written for the occasion. He did it this time, and it was

up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen to

as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of

heart and brain.

Now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable

celebration of Mr. Whittier's seventieth birthday--because I got up at

that point and followed Winter, with what I have no doubt I supposed

would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the

Boston paper. I had written it all out the day before and had perfectly

memorized it, and I stood up there at my genial and happy and

self-satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. Those majestic guests;

that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened; as did

everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. Well, I delivered

myself of--we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. I was

expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the

case as regarded the rest of it. I arrived now at the dialogue: "The

old miner said, 'You are the fourth, I'm going to move.' 'The fourth

what?' said I. He answered, 'The fourth littery man that has been here

in twenty-four hours. I am going to move.' 'Why, you don't tell me;'

said I. 'Who were the others?' 'Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver

Wendell Holmes, consound the lot--'"

Now, then, the house's attention continued, but the expression of

interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what

the trouble was. I didn't know. I went on, but with difficulty

--I struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description of

the bogus Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always hoping

--but with a gradually perishing hope that somebody--would laugh, or that

somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know enough to

give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and so I went

on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to the end,

in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with horror.

It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if I had been

making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the Trinity; there

is no milder way, in which to describe the petrified condition and the

ghastly expression of those people.

When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat.

I shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as

miserable again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what

the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I shall

never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near me,

tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp. There

was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had good

intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It was an

atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's salamander

had been in that place he would not have survived to be put into

Cellini's autobiography. There was a frightful pause. There was an

awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had

to get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just

burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had

appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a place which would make any novel

respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel itself was

recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. Bishop was

away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest,

consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may

say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from

Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands

ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for the

first time in his life speak in public. It was under these damaging

conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I had

spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able to go

on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop had

had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities--facing those

other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in

his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away in

his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard

from. I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that

dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head like

the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there wasn't any

fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last long. It was not many

sentence's after his first before he began to hesitate, and break, and

lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a

limp and mushy pile.

Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than

one-third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The next man

hadn't strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so

stupefied, paralyzed; it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or

even try. Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere. Howells

mournfully, and without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and

supported us out of the room. It was very kind--he was most generous.

He towed us tottering away into same room in that building, and we sat

down there. I don't know what my remark was now, but I know the nature

of it. It was the kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in

the world can help your case. But Howells was honest--he had to say the

heart-breaking things he did say: that there was no help for this

calamity, this shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most

disastrous thing that had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he

added, "That is, for you--and consider what you have done for Bishop. It

is bad enough in your case, you deserve, to suffer. You have committed

this crime, and you deserve to have all you are going to get. But here

is an innocent man. Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you

have done to him. He can never hold his head up again. The world can

never look upon Bishop as being a live person. He is a corpse."

That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which

pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two whenever

it forced its way into my mind.

Now then, I take that speech up and examine it. As I said, it arrived

this morning, from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an

idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last.

It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with

humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it

anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is

amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and

those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with

me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was

going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I

showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully

funny if you show that you are afraid of it. Well, I can't account for

it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back

here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old

speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all over

that stage. Oh, the fault must have been with me, it is not in the

speech at all.

PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS

ADDRESS AT THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, N. E. SOCIETY,

PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 22, 1881

On calling upon Mr. Clemens to make response,

President Rollins said:

"This sentiment has been assigned to one who was never exactly

born in New England, nor, perhaps, were any of his ancestors.

He is not technically, therefore, of New England descent.

Under the painful circumstances in which he has found himself,

however, he has done the best he could--he has had all his

children born there, and has made of himself a New England

ancestor. He is a self-made man. More than this, and better

even, in cheerful, hopeful, helpful literature he is of New

England ascent. To ascend there in any thing that's reasonable

is difficult; for--confidentially, with the door shut--we all

know that they are the brightest, ablest sons of that goodly

land who never leave it, and it is among and above them that

Mr. Twain has made his brilliant and permanent ascent--become

a man of mark."

I rise to protest. I have kept still for years; but really I think there

is no sufficient justification for this sort of thing. What do you want

to celebrate those people for?--those ancestors of yours of 1620--the

Mayflower tribe, I mean. What do you want to celebrate them for? Your

pardon: the gentleman at my left assures me that you are not celebrating

the Pilgrims themselves, but the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth rock

on the 22d of December. So you are celebrating their landing. Why, the

other pretext was thin enough, but this is thinner than ever; the other

was tissue, tinfoil, fish-bladder, but this is gold-leaf. Celebrating

their lauding! What was there remarkable about it, I would like to know?

What can you be thinking of? Why, those Pilgrims had been at sea three

or four months. It was the very middle of winter: it was as cold as

death off Cape Cod there. Why shouldn't they come ashore? If they

hadn't landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact: It

would have been a case of monumental leatherheadedness which the world

would not willingly let die. If it had been you, gentlemen, you probably

wouldn't have landed, but you have no shadow of right to be celebrating,

in your ancestors, gifts which they did not exercise, but only

transmitted. Why, to be celebrating the mere landing of the Pilgrims

--to be trying to make out that this most natural and simple and

customary procedure was an extraordinary circumstance--a circumstance to

be amazed at, and admired, aggrandized and glorified, at orgies like this

for two hundred and sixty years--hang it, a horse would have known enough

to land; a horse--Pardon again; the gentleman on my right assures me that

it was not merely the landing of the Pilgrims that we are celebrating,

but the Pilgrims themselves. So we have struck an inconsistency here

--one says it was the landing, the other says it was the Pilgrims. It

is an inconsistency characteristic of your intractable and disputatious

tribe, for you never agree about anything but Boston. Well, then, what

do you want to celebrate those Pilgrims for? They were a mighty hard

lot--you know it. I grant you, without the slightest unwillingness, that

they were a deal more gentle and merciful and just than were the people

of Europe of that day; I grant you that they are better than their

predecessors. But what of that?--that is nothing. People always

progress. You are better than your fathers and grandfathers were

(this is the first time I have ever aimed a measureless slander at the

departed, for I consider such things improper). Yes, those among you who

have not been in the penitentiary, if such there be, are better than your

fathers and grandfathers were; but is that any sufficient reason, for

getting up annual dinners and celebrating you? No, by no means--by no

means. Well, I repeat, those Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good

care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else's ancestors. I am

a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee

by adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this,

gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man. But where are

my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw

material?

My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian--an early Indian.

Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of my

blood flows in that Indian's veins today. I stand here, lone and

forlorn, without an ancestor. They skinned him! I do not object to

that, if they needed his fur; but alive, gentlemen-alive! They skinned

him alive--and before company! That is what rankles. Think how he must

have felt; for he was a sensitive person and easily embarrassed. If he

had been a bird, it would have been all right, and no violence done to

his feelings, because he would have been considered "dressed." But he

was not a bird, gentlemen, he was a man, and probably one of the most

undressed men that ever was. I ask you to put yourselves in his place.

I ask it as a favor; I ask it as a tardy act of justice; I ask it in the

interest of fidelity to the traditions of your ancestors; I ask it that

the world may contemplate, with vision unobstructed by disguising

swallow-tails and white cravats, the spectacle which the true New England

Society ought to present. Cease to come to these annual orgies in this

hollow modern mockery--the surplusage of raiment. Come in character;

come in the summer grace, come in the unadorned simplicity, come in the

free and joyous costume which your sainted ancestors provided for mine.

Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke

Stevenson, et al. Your tribe chased them put of the country for their

religion's sake; promised them death if they came back; for your

ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved, and braved the perils of the

sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to acquire that

highest and most precious of boons, freedom for every man on this broad

continent to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience--and

they were not going to allow a lot of pestiferous Quakers to interfere

with it. Your ancestors broke forever the chains of political slavery,

and gave the vote to every man in this wide land, excluding none!--none

except those who did not belong to the orthodox church. Your ancestors

--yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless, they gave us religious

liberty to worship as they required us to worship, and political liberty

to vote as the church required; and so I the bereft one, I the forlorn

one, am here to do my best to help you celebrate them right.

The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine. Your people

were pretty severe with her you will confess that. But, poor thing!

I believe they changed her opinions before she died, and took her into

their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when she died she

went to the same place which your ancestors went to. It is a great pity,

for she was a good woman. Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine.

I don't really remember what your people did with him. But they banished

him to Rhode Island, anyway. And then, I believe, recognizing that this

was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took pity

on him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem witches

were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them. Yes,

they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal with

them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly a halter in our family

from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine years.

The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your

progenitors was an ancestor of mine--for I am of a mixed breed, an

infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I'm not one of your sham

meerschaums that you can color in a week. No, my complexion is the

patient art of eight generations. Well, in my own time, I had acquired a

lot of my kin--by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and another

--and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn perversity of

your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away from me. And so,

again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my blood flows in the

veins of any living being who is marketable.

O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine. You have

heard the speeches. Disband these New England societies--nurseries of a

system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if

persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you into

prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are still

temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech

you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a

simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or

at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for

hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this

one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know

that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing

with rocks, this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five

cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least

throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its

taxes:

Yes, hear your true friend-your only true friend--list to his voice.

Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay--perpetuators of

ancestral superstition. Here on this board I see water, I see milk, I

see the wild and deadly lemonade. These are but steps upon the downward

path. Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee--hotel coffee.

A few more years--all too few, I fear--mark my words, we shall have

cider! Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late. You are on the broad road

which leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and

the gallows! I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious

friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your

impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New

England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from

varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors--the

super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of

Plymouth Rock--go home, and try to learn to behave!

However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your

Pilgrim stock as much as you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and

adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine once--a man of sturdy

opinions, of sincere make of mind, and not given to flattery. He said:

"People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but, after all's

said and done, it would be pretty hard to improve on those people; and,

as for me, I don't mind coming out flatfooted and saying there ain't any

way to improve on them--except having them born in, Missouri!"

COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES

DELIVERED AT THE LOTOS CLUB, JANUARY 11, 1908

In introducing Mr. Clemens, Frank R. Lawrence, the President

of the Lotos Club, recalled the fact that the first club dinner

in the present club-house, some fourteen years ago, was in

honor of Mark Twain.

I wish to begin this time at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether;

that is to say, I wish to thank you for this welcome that you are giving,

and the welcome which you gave me seven years ago, and which I forgot to

thank you for at that time. I also wish to thank you for the welcome you

gave me fourteen years ago, which I also forgot to thank you for at the

time.

I hope you will continue this custom to give me a dinner every seven

years before I join the hosts in the other world--I do not know which

world.

Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Porter have paid me many compliments. It is very

difficult to take compliments. I do not care whether you deserve the

compliments or not, it is just as difficult to take them. The other

night I was at the Engineers' Club, and enjoyed the sufferings of

Mr. Carnegie. They were complimenting him there; there it was all

compliments, and none of them deserved. They say that you cannot live

by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.

I do not make any pretence that I dislike compliments. The stronger the

better, and I can manage to digest them. I think I have lost so much by

not making a collection of compliments, to put them away and take them

out again once in a while. When in England I said that I would start to

collect compliments, and I began there and I have brought some of them

along.

The first one of these lies--I wrote them down and preserved them

--I think they are mighty good and extremely just. It is one of Hamilton

Mabie's compliments. He said that La Salle was the first one to make a

voyage of the Mississippi, but Mark Twain was the first to chart, light,

and navigate it for the whole world.

If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on

the Mississippi], it would have been money in my pocket. I tell you, it

is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring

true. It's an art by itself.

Here is another compliment by Albert Bigelow Paine, my biographer. He is

writing four octavo volumes about me, and he has been at my elbow two and

one-half years.

I just suppose that he does not know me, but says he knows me. He says

"Mark Twain is not merely a great writer, a great philosopher, a great

man; he is the supreme expression of the human being, with his strength

and his weakness." What a talent for compression! It takes a genius in

compression to compact as many facts as that.

W. D. Howells spoke of me as first of Hartford, and ultimately of the

solar system, not to say of the universe:

You know how modest Howells is. If it can be proved that my fame reaches

to Neptune and Saturn; that will satisfy even me. You know how modest

and retiring Howells seems to be, but deep down he is as vain as I am.

Mr. Howells had been granted a degree at Oxford, whose gown was red.

He had been invited to an exercise at Columbia, and upon inquiry had been

told that it was usual to wear the black gown: Later he had found that

three other men wore bright gowns, and he had lamented that he had been

one of the black mass, and not a red torch.

Edison wrote: "The average American loves his family. If he has any love

left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain."

Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl which came to me

indirectly. She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of

me. After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:

"We've got a John the Baptist like that." She also said: "Only ours has

more trimmings."

I suppose she meant the halo. Now here is a gold-miner's compliment.

It is forty-two years old. It was my introduction to an audience to

which I lectured in a log school-house. There were no ladies there.

I wasn't famous then. They didn't know me. Only the miners were there,

with their breeches tucked into their boottops and with clay all over

them. They wanted some one to introduce me, and they selected a miner,

who protested, saying:

"I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things

about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't

know why."

There's one thing I want to say about that English trip. I knew his

Majesty the King of England long years ago, and I didn't meet him for the

first time then. One thing that I regret was that some newspapers said

I talked with the Queen of England with my hat on. I don't do that with

any woman. I did not put it on until she asked me to. Then she told me

to put it on, and it's a command there. I thought I had carried my

American democracy far enough. So I put it on. I have no use for a hat,

and never did have.

Who was it who said that the police of London knew me? Why, the police

know me everywhere. There never was a day over there when a policeman

did not salute me, and then put up his hand and stop the traffic of the

world. They treated me as though I were a duchess.

The happiest experience I had in England was at a dinner given in the

building of the Punch publication, a humorous paper which is appreciated

by all Englishmen. It was the greatest privilege ever allowed a

foreigner. I entered the dining-room of the building, where those men

get together who have been running the paper for over fifty years. We

were about to begin dinner when the toastmaster said: "Just a minute;

there ought to be a little ceremony." Then there was that meditating

silence for a while, and out of a closet there came a beautiful little

girl dressed in pink, holding in her hand a copy of the previous week's

paper, which had in it my cartoon. It broke me all up. I could not even

say "Thank you." That was the prettiest incident of the dinner, the

delight of all that wonderful table. When she was about to go; I said,

"My child, you are not going to leave me; I have hardly got acquainted

with you." She replied, "You know I've got to go; they never let me come

in here before, and they never will again." That is one of the beautiful

incidents that I cherish.

[At the conclusion of his speech, and while the diners were still

cheering him, Colonel Porter brought forward the red-and-gray gown

of the Oxford "doctor," and Mr. Clemens was made to don it.

The diners rose to their feet in their enthusiasm. With the

mortar-board on his head, and looking down admiringly at himself,

Mr. Twain said--]

I like that gown. I always did like red. The redder it is the better

I like it. I was born for a savage. Now, whoever saw any red like this?

There is no red outside the arteries of an archangel that could compare

with this. I know you all envy me. I am going to have luncheon shortly

with ladies just ladies. I will be the only lady of my sex present, and

I shall put on this gown and make those ladies look dim.

BOOKS, AUTHORS, AND HATS

ADDRESS AT THE PILGRIMS' CLUB LUNCHEON, GIVEN IN HONOR OF Mr.

CLEMENS AT THE SAVOY HOTEL, LONDON, JUNE 25, 1907.

Mr. Birrell, M.P., Chief-Secretary for Ireland, in introducing

Mr. Clemens said: "We all love Mark Twain, and we are here to

tell him so. One more point--all the world knows it, and that

is why it is dangerous to omit it--our guest is a distinguished

citizen of the Great Republic beyond the seas. In America his

'Huckleberry Finn' and his 'Tom Sawyer' are what 'Robinson

Crusoe' and 'Tom Brown's School Days' have been to us. They

are racy of the soil. They are books to which it is impossible

to place any period of termination. I will not speak of the

classics--reminiscences of much evil in our early lives. We do

not meet here to-day as critics with our appreciations and

depreciations, our twopenny little prefaces or our forewords.

I am not going to say what the world a thousand years hence

will think of Mark Twain. Posterity will take care of itself,

will read what it wants to read, will forget what it chooses to

forget, and will pay no attention whatsoever to our critical

mumblings and jumblings. Let us therefore be content to say to

our friend and guest that we are here speaking for ourselves

and for our children, to say what he has been to us. I

remember in Liverpool, in 1867, first buying the copy, which I

still preserve, of the celebrated 'Jumping Frog.' It had a few

words of preface which reminded me then that our guest in those

days was called 'the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,' and a

few lines later down, 'the moralist of the Main.' That was

some forty years ago. Here he is, still the humorist, still

the moralist. His humor enlivens and enlightens his morality,

and his morality is all the better for his humor. That is one

of the reasons why we love him. I am not here to mention any

book of his--that is a subject of dispute in my family circle,

which is the best and which is the next best--but I must put in

a word, lest I should not be true to myself--a terrible thing

--for his Joan of Arc, a book of chivalry, of nobility, and of

manly sincerity for which I take this opportunity of thanking

him. But you can all drink this toast, each one of you with

his own intention. You can get into it what meaning you like.

Mark Twain is a man whom English and Americans do well to

honor. He is the true consolidator of nations. His delightful

humor is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national

prejudices. His truth and his honor, his love of truth, and

his love of honor, overflow all boundaries. He has made the

world better by his presence. We rejoice to see him here.

Long may he live to reap the plentiful harvest of hearty,

honest human affection!"

Pilgrims, I desire first to thank those undergraduates of Oxford.

When a man has grown so old as I am, when he has reached the verge of

seventy-two years, there is nothing that carries him back to the

dreamland of his life, to his boyhood, like recognition of those young

hearts up yonder. And so I thank them out of my heart. I desire to thank

the Pilgrims of New York also for their kind notice and message which

they have cabled over here. Mr. Birrell says he does not know how he got

here. But he will be able to get away all right--he has not drunk

anything since he came here. I am glad to know about those friends of

his, Otway and Chatterton--fresh, new names to me. I am glad of the

disposition he has shown to rescue them from the evils of poverty, and if

they are still in London, I hope to have a talk with them. For a while I

thought he was going to tell us the effect which my book had upon his

growing manhood. I thought he was going to tell us how much that effect

amounted to, and whether it really made him what he now is, but with the

discretion born of Parliamentary experience he dodged that, and we do not

know now whether he read the book or not. He did that very neatly. I

could not do it any better myself.

My books have had effects, and very good ones, too, here and there, and

some others not so good. There is no doubt about that. But I remember

one monumental instance of it years and years ago. Professor Norton, of

Harvard, was over here, and when he came back to Boston I went out with

Howells to call on him. Norton was allied in some way by marriage with

Darwin.

Mr. Norton was very gentle in what he had to say, and almost delicate,

and he said: "Mr. Clemens, I have been spending some time with Mr. Darwin

in England, and I should like to tell you something connected with that

visit. You were the object of it, and I myself would have been very

proud of it, but you may not be proud of it. At any rate, I am going to

tell you what it was, and to leave to you to regard it as you please.

Mr. Darwin took me up to his bedroom and pointed out certain things

there-pitcher-plants, and so on, that he was measuring and watching from

day to day--and he said: 'The chambermaid is permitted to do what she

pleases in this room, but she must never touch those plants and never

touch those books on that table by that candle. With those books I read

myself to sleep every night.' Those were your own books." I said:

"There is no question to my mind as to whether I should regard that as a

compliment or not. I do regard it as a very great compliment and a very

high honor that that great mind, laboring for the whole human race,

should rest itself on my books. I am proud that he should read himself

to sleep with them."

Now, I could not keep that to myself--I was so proud of it. As soon as I

got home to Hartford I called up my oldest friend--and dearest enemy on

occasion--the Rev. Joseph Twichell, my pastor, and I told him about that,

and, of course, he was full of interest and venom. Those people who get

no compliments like that feel like that. He went off. He did not issue

any applause of any kind, and I did not hear of that subject for some

time. But when Mr. Darwin passed away from this life, and some time

after Darwin's Life and Letters came out, the Rev. Mr. Twichell procured

an early copy of that work and found something in it which he considered

applied to me. He came over to my house--it was snowing, raining,

sleeting, but that did not make any difference to Twichell. He produced

the book, and turned over and over, until he came to a certain place,

when he said: "Here, look at this letter from Mr. Darwin to Sir Joseph

Hooker." What Mr. Darwin said--I give you the idea and not the very

words--was this: I do not know whether I ought to have devoted my whole

life to these drudgeries in natural history and the other sciences or

not, for while I may have gained in one way I have lost in another. Once

I had a fine perception and appreciation of high literature, but in me

that quality is atrophied. "That was the reason," said Mr. Twichell, "he

was reading your books."

Mr. Birrell has touched lightly--very lightly, but in not an

uncomplimentary way--on my position in this world as a moralist. I am

glad to have that recognition, too, because I have suffered since I have

been in this town; in the first place, right away, when I came here, from

a newsman going around with a great red, highly displayed placard in the

place of an apron. He was selling newspapers, and there were two

sentences on that placard which would have been all right if they had

been punctuated; but they ran those two sentences together without a

comma or anything, and that would naturally create a wrong impression,

because it said, "Mark Twain arrives Ascot Cup stolen." No doubt many a

person was misled by those sentences joined together in that unkind way.

I have no doubt my character has suffered from it. I suppose I ought to

defend my character, but how can I defend it? I can say here and now

--and anybody can see by my face that I am sincere, that I speak the truth

--that I have never seen that Cup. I have not got the Cup--I did not have

a chance to get it. I have always had a good character in that way. I

have hardly ever stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had

discretion enough to know about the value of it first. I do not steal

things that are likely to get myself into trouble. I do not think any of

us do that. I know we all take things--that is to be expected--but

really, I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts

to any great thing. I do confess that when I was here seven years ago I

stole a hat, but that did not amount to anything. It was not a good hat,

and was only a clergyman's hat, anyway.

I was at a luncheon party, and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also. I

dare say he is Archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in

the Westminster battery, if that is the proper term--I do not know, as

you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much. He left the

luncheon table before I did. He began this. I did steal his hat, but he

began by taking mine. I make that interjection because I would not

accuse Archdeacon Wilberforce of stealing my hat--I should not think of

it. I confine that phrase to myself. He merely took my hat.

And with good judgment, too--it was a better hat than his. He came out

before the luncheon was over, and sorted the hats in the hall, and

selected one which suited. It happened to be mine. He went off with it.

When I came out by-and-by there was no hat there which would go on my

head except his, which was left behind. My head was not the customary

size just at that time. I had been receiving a good many very nice and

complimentary attentions, and my head was a couple of sizes larger than

usual, and his hat just suited me. The bumps and corners were all right

intellectually. There were results pleasing to me--possibly so to him.

He found out whose hat it was, and wrote me saying it was pleasant that

all the way home, whenever he met anybody his gravities, his solemnities,

his deep thoughts, his eloquent remarks were all snatched up by the

people he met, and mistaken for brilliant humorisms.

I had another experience. It was not unpleasing. I was received with a

deference which was entirely foreign to my experience by everybody whom I

met, so that before I got home I had a much higher opinion of myself than

I have ever had before or since. And there is in that very connection an

incident which I remember at that old date which is rather melancholy to

me, because it shows how a person can deteriorate in a mere seven years.

It is seven years ago. I have not that hat now. I was going down

Pall-Mall, or some other of your big streets, and I recognized that that

hat needed ironing. I went into a big shop and passed in my hat, and

asked that it might be ironed. They were courteous, very courteous, even

courtly. They brought that hat back to me presently very sleek and nice,

and I asked how much there was to pay. They replied that they did not

charge the clergy anything. I have cherished the delight of that moment

from that day to this. It was the first thing I did the other day to go

and hunt up that shop and hand in my hat to have it ironed. I said when

it came back, "How much to pay?" They said, "Ninepence." In seven years

I have acquired all that worldliness, and I am sorry to be back where I

was seven years ago.

But now I am chaffing and chaffing and chaffing here, and I hope you will

forgive me for that; but when a man stands on the verge of seventy-two

you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing

what this life is heart-breaking bereavement. And so our reverence is

for our dead. We do not forget them; but our duty is toward the living;

and if we can be cheerful, cheerful in spirit, cheerful in speech and in

hope, that is a benefit to those who are around us.

My own history includes an incident which will always connect me with

England in a pathetic way, for when I arrived here seven years ago with

my wife and my daughter--we had gone around the globe lecturing to raise

money to clear off a debt--my wife and one of my daughters started across

the ocean to bring to England our eldest daughter. She was twenty four

years of age and in the bloom of young womanhood, and we were

unsuspecting. When my wife and daughter--and my wife has passed from

this life since--when they had reached mid Atlantic, a cablegram--one of

those heartbreaking cablegrams which we all in our days have to

experience--was put into my hand. It stated that that daughter of ours

had gone to her long sleep. And so, as I say, I cannot always be

cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing; I must sometimes lay the cap

and bells aside, and recognize that I am of the human race like the rest,

and must have my cares and griefs. And therefore I noticed what Mr.

Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it--something that was in the

nature of these verses here at the top of this:

"He lit our life with shafts of sun

And vanquished pain.

Thus two great nations stand as one

In honoring Twain."

I am very glad to have those verses. I am very glad and very grateful

for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection. I have received since I

have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions

of people in England--men, women, and children--and there is in them

compliment, praise, and, above all and better than all, there is in them

a note of affection. Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection

--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can

win, whether by character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have

that reward. All these letters make me feel that here in England--as in

America--when I stand under the English flag, I am not a stranger. I am

not an alien, but at home.

DEDICATION SPEECH

AT THE DEDICATION OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,

MAY 16, 1908

Mr. Clemens wore his gown as Doctor of Laws, Oxford University.

Ambassador Bryce and Mr. Choate had made the formal addresses.

How difficult, indeed, is the higher education. Mr. Choate needs a

little of it. He is not only short as a statistician of New York, but he

is off, far off, in his mathematics. The four thousand citizens of

Greater New York, indeed!

But I don't think it was wise or judicious on the part of Mr. Choate to

show this higher education he has obtained. He sat in the lap of that

great education (I was there at the time), and see the result--the

lamentable result. Maybe if he had had a sandwich here to sustain him

the result would not have been so serious.

For seventy-two years I have been striving to acquire that higher

education which stands for modesty and diffidence, and it doesn't work.

And then look at Ambassador Bryce, who referred to his alma mater,

Oxford. He might just as well have included me. Well, I am a later

production.

If I am the latest graduate, I really and sincerely hope I am not the

final flower of its seven centuries; I hope it may go on for seven ages

longer.

DIE SCHRECKEN DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE [THE HORRORS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE]

ADDRESS TO THE VIENNA PRESS CLUB, NOVEMBER 21, 1897,

DELIVERED IN GERMAN [Here in literal translation]

It has me deeply touched, my gentlemen, here so hospitably received to

be. From colleagues out of my own profession, in this from my own home

so far distant land. My heart is full of gratitude, but my poverty of

German words forces me to greater economy of expression. Excuse you, my

gentlemen, that I read off, what I you say will. [But he didn't read].

The German language speak I not good, but have numerous connoisseurs me

assured that I her write like an angel. Maybe--maybe--I know not. Have

till now no acquaintance with the angels had. That comes later--when it

the dear God please--it has no hurry.

Since long, my gentlemen, have I the passionate longing nursed a speech

on German to hold, but one has me not permitted. Men, who no feeling for

the art had, laid me ever hindrance in the way and made naught my desire

--sometimes by excuses, often by force. Always said these men to me:

"Keep you still, your Highness! Silence! For God's sake seek another

way and means yourself obnoxious to make."

In the present case, as usual it is me difficult become, for me the

permission to obtain. The committee sorrowed deeply, but could me the

permission not grant on account of a law which from the Concordia demands

she shall the German language protect. Du liebe Zeit! How so had one to

me this say could--might--dared--should? I am indeed the truest friend

of the German language--and not only now, but from long since--yes,

before twenty years already. And never have I the desire had the noble

language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve--I would

her only reform. It is the dream of my life been. I have already visits

by the various German governments paid and for contracts prayed. I am

now to Austria in the same task come. I would only some changes effect.

I would only the language method--the luxurious, elaborate construction

compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the

introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the

verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover

can. With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify

so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One her yonder-up

understands.

I beseech you, from me yourself counsel to let, execute these mentioned

reforms. Then will you an elegant language possess, and afterward, when

you some thing say will, will you at least yourself understand what you

said had. But often nowadays, when you a mile-long sentence from you

given and you yourself somewhat have rested, then must you have a

touching inquisitiveness have yourself to determine what you actually

spoken have. Before several days has the correspondent of a local paper

a sentence constructed which hundred and twelve words contain, and

therein were seven parentheses smuggled in, and the subject seven times

changed. Think you only, my gentlemen, in the course of the voyage of a

single sentence must the poor, persecuted, fatigued subject seven times

change position!

Now, when we the mentioned reforms execute, will it no longer so bad be.

Doch noch eins. I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit

reform. I might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history

of the Thirty Years' War between the two members of a separable verb

in-pushed. That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller the

permission refused the History of the Hundred Years' War to compose--God

be it thanked! After all these reforms established be will, will the

German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be.

Since to you now, my gentlemen, the character of my mission known is,

beseech I you so friendly to be and to me your valuable help grant.

Mr. Potzl has the public believed make would that I to Vienna come am in

order the bridges to clog up and the traffic to hinder, while I

observations gather and note. Allow you yourselves but not from him

deceived. My frequent presence on the bridges has an entirely innocent

ground. Yonder gives it the necessary space, yonder can one a noble long

German sentence elaborate, the bridge-railing along, and his whole

contents with one glance overlook. On the one end of the railing pasted

I the first member of a separable verb and the final member cleave I to

the other end--then spread the body of the sentence between it out!

Usually are for my purposes the bridges of the city long enough; when I

but Potzl's writings study will I ride out and use the glorious endless

imperial bridge. But this is a calumny; Potzl writes the prettiest

German. Perhaps not so pliable as the mine, but in many details much

better. Excuse you these flatteries. These are well deserved.

Now I my speech execute--no, I would say I bring her to the close. I am a

foreigner--but here, under you, have I it entirely forgotten. And so

again and yet again proffer I you my heartiest thanks.

GERMAN FOR THE HUNGARIANS

ADDRESS AT THE JUBILEE CELEBRATION OF THE EMANCIPATION OF THE

HUNGARIAN PRESS, MARCH 26, 1899

The Ministry and members of Parliament were present. The

subject was the "Ausgleich"--i. e., the arrangement for the

apportionment of the taxes between Hungary and Austria.

Paragraph 14 of the ausgleich fixes the proportion each country

must pay to the support of the army. It is the paragraph which

caused the trouble and prevented its renewal.

Now that we are all here together, I think it will be a good idea to

arrange the ausgleich. If you will act for Hungary I shall be quite

willing to act for Austria, and this is the very time for it. There

couldn't be a better, for we are all feeling friendly, fair-minded, and

hospitable now, and, full of admiration for each other, full of

confidence in each other, full of the spirit of welcome, full of the

grace of forgiveness, and the disposition to let bygones be bygones.

Let us not waste this golden, this beneficent, this providential

opportunity. I am willing to make any concession you want, just so we

get it settled. I am not only willing to let grain come in free, I am

willing to pay the freight on it, and you may send delegates to the

Reichsrath if you like. All I require is that they shall be quiet,

peaceable people like your own deputies, and not disturb our proceedings.

If you want the Gegenseitigengeldbeitragendenverhaltnismassigkeiten

rearranged and readjusted I am ready for that. I will let you off at

twenty-eight per cent.--twenty-seven--even twenty-five if you insist,

for there is nothing illiberal about me when I am out on a diplomatic

debauch.

Now, in return for these concessions, I am willing to take anything in

reason, and I think we may consider the business settled and the

ausgleich ausgegloschen at last for ten solid years, and we will sign the

papers in blank, and do it here and now.

Well, I am unspeakably glad to have that ausgleich off my hands. It has

kept me awake nights for anderthalbjahr.

But I never could settle it before, because always when I called at the

Foreign Office in Vienna to talk about it, there wasn't anybody at home,

and that is not a place where you can go in and see for yourself whether

it is a mistake or not, because the person who takes care of the front

door there is of a size that discourages liberty of action and the free

spirit of investigation. To think the ausgleich is abgemacht at last!

It is a grand and beautiful consummation, and I am glad I came.

The way I feel now I do honestly believe I would rather be just my own

humble self at this moment than paragraph 14.

A NEW GERMAN WORD

To aid a local charity Mr. Clemens appeared before a

fashionable audience in Vienna, March 10, 1899, reading his

sketch "The Lucerne Girl," and describing how he had been

interviewed and ridiculed. He said in part:

I have not sufficiently mastered German, to allow my using it with

impunity. My collection of fourteen-syllable German words is still

incomplete. But I have just added to that collection a jewel

--a veritable jewel. I found it in a telegram from Linz, and it

contains ninety-five letters:

Personaleinkommensteuerschatzungskommissionsmitgliedsreisekostenrechnungs

erganzungsrevisionsfund

If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep

beneath it in peace.

UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

DELIVERED AT THE DINNER GIVEN BY THE PUBLISHERS OF "THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY" TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, IN HONOR OF HIS

SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY, AUGUST 29, 1879

I would have travelled a much greater distance than I have come to

witness the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes; for my feeling toward him

has always been one of peculiar warmth. When one receives a letter from

a great man for the first time in his life, it is a large event to him,

as all of you know by your own experience. You never can receive letters

enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one, or dim the

memory of the pleasant surprise it was, and the gratification it gave

you. Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap.

Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest

--Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever

stole anything from--and that is how I came to write to him and he to me.

When my first book was new, a friend of mine said to me, "The dedication

is very neat." Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said, "I always

admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad." I naturally

said: "What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?" "Well, I

saw it first some years ago as Doctor Holmes's dedication to his Songs in

Many Keys." Of course, my first impulse was to prepare this man's

remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a

moment or two and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could:

We stepped into a book-store, and he did prove it. I had really stolen

that dedication, almost word for word. I could not imagine how this

curious thing had happened; for I knew one thing--that a certain amount

of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this

pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas.

That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man--and admirers had

often told me I had nearly a basketful--though they were rather reserved

as to the size of the basket.

However, I thought the thing out, and solved the mystery. Two years

before, I had been laid up a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and

had read and re-read Doctor Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was

filled up with them to the brim. The dedication lay on the top, and

handy, so, by-and-by, I unconsciously stole it. Perhaps I unconsciously

stole the rest of the volume, too, for many people have told me that my

book was pretty poetical, in one way or another. Well, of course, I

wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote

back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done;

and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas

gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with

ourselves. He stated a truth, and did it in such a pleasant way, and

salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather

glad I had committed the crime, far the sake of the letter. I afterward

called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine

that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by

that that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along right from

the start. I have not met Doctor Holmes many times since; and lately he

said--However, I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which

I got on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my

fellow-teachers of the great public, and likewise to say that I am right

glad to see that Doctor Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous

life; and as age is not determined by years, but by trouble and

infirmities of mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet

before any one can truthfully say, "He is growing old."

THE WEATHER

ADDRESS AT THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY'S SEVENTY FIRST

ANNUAL DINNER, NEW YORK CITY

The next toast was: "The Oldest Inhabitant-The Weather of New England."

"Who can lose it and forget it?

Who can have it and regret it?

Be interposer 'twixt us Twain."

--Merchant of Venice.

I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in

New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it

must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and

learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted

to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take

their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is a sumptuous

variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's

admiration--and regret. The weather is always doing something there;

always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and

trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through

more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have

counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of

four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame and fortune of that

man that had that marvellous collection of weather on exhibition at the

Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all

over the world and get specimens from all the climes. I said, "Don't you

do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day." I told him

what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he

came and he made his collection in four days. As to variety, why, he

confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never

heard of before. And as to quantity well, after he had picked out and

discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather

enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to

deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor. The people of

New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some

things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets

for writing about "Beautiful Spring." These are generally casual

visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and

cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring. And so the

first thing they know the opportunity to inquire how they feel has

permanently gone by. Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for

accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the

paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what to-day's

weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States,

in the Wisconsin region. See him sail along in the joy and pride of his

power till he gets to New England, and then see his tail drop.

He doesn't know what the weather is going to be in New England.

Well, he mulls over it, and by and-by he gets out something about like

this: Probably northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward

and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer

swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail,

and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and

lightning. Then he jots down his postscript from his wandering mind, to

cover accidents. "But it is possible that the programme may be wholly

changed in the mean time." Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New

England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one

thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of

it--a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the

procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought; you leave

your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get

drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand

from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first

thing you know you get struck by lightning. These are great

disappointments; but they can't be helped. The lightning there is

peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't

leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd

think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.

And the thunder. When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape

and saw, and key up the instruments for the performance, strangers say,

"Why, what awful thunder you have here!" But when the baton is raised and

the real concert begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar

with his head in the ash-barrel. Now as to the size of the weather in

New England--lengthways, I mean. It is utterly disproportioned to the

size of that little country. Half the time, when it is packed as full as

it can stick, you will see that New England weather sticking out beyond

the edges and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the

neighboring States. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather. You can

see cracks all about where she has strained herself trying to do it.

I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England

weather, but I will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a

tin roof. So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that

luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No, sir;

skips it every time. Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to

do honor to the New England weather--no language could do it justice.

But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather

(or, if you please, effects produced by it) which we residents would not

like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should

still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for

all its bullying vagaries--the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed

with ice from the bottom to the top--ice that is as bright and clear as

crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen

dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of

Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun

comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that

glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change

and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red

to green, and green to gold--the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very

explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax,

the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating,

intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.

THE BABIES

THE BABIES

DELIVERED AT THE BANQUET, IN CHICAGO, GIVEN BY THE ARMY OF THE

TENNESSEE TO THEIR FIRST COMMANDER, GENERAL U. S. GRANT,

NOVEMBER, 1879

The fifteenth regular toast was "The Babies.--As they comfort

us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities."

I like that. We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have

not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works

down to the babies, we stand on common ground. It is a shame that for a

thousand years the world's banquets have utterly ignored the baby, as if

he didn't amount to anything. If you will stop and think a minute--if

you will go back fifty or one hundred years to your early married life

and recontemplate your first baby--you will remember that he amounted to

a good deal, and even something over. You soldiers all know that when

that little fellow arrived at family headquarters you had to hand in your

resignation. He took entire command. You became his lackey, his mere

body-servant, and you had to stand around too. He was not a commander

who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or anything else. You

had to execute his order whether it was possible or not. And there was

only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the

double-quick. He treated you with every sort of insolence and

disrespect, and the bravest of you didn't dare to say a word. You could

face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for

blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted

your nose, you had to take it. When the thunders of war were sounding in

your ears you set your faces toward the batteries, and advanced with

steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his war whoop you

advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the chance, too.

When he called for soothing-syrup, did you venture to throw out any

side-remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer and a

gentleman? No. You got up and got it. When he ordered his pap bottle

and it was not warm, did you talk back? Not you. You went to work and

warmed it. You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a

suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right--three

parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a

drop of peppermint to kill those immortal hiccoughs. I can taste that

stuff yet. And how many things you learned as you went along!

Sentimental young folks still take stock in that beautiful old saying

that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are

whispering to him. Very pretty, but too thin--simply wind on the

stomach, my friends. If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual

hour, two o'clock in the morning, didn't you rise up promptly and remark,

with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book much,

that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself? Oh!

you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down

the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified

baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!

--Rock a-by Baby in the Tree-top, for instance. What a spectacle far an

Army of the Tennessee! And what an affliction for the neighbors, too;

for it is not everybody within, a mile around that likes military music

at three in the morning. And, when you had been keeping this sort of

thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet head intimated that

nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? You simply

went on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby

doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front

yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and

your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising,

irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities. Do what you please, you

can't make him stay on the reservation. Sufficient unto the day is one

baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for

twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot. And there ain't any real

difference between triplets and an insurrection.

Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of

the babies. Think what is in store for the present crop! Fifty years

from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still

survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic

numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our

increase. Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political

leviathan--a Great Eastern. The cradled babies of to-day will be on

deck. Let them be well trained, for we are going to leave a big contract

on their hands. Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in

the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred

things, if we could know which ones they are. In one of these cradles

the unconscious Farragut of the future is at this moment teething think

of it! and putting in a world of dead earnest, unarticulated, but

perfectly justifiable profanity over it, too. In another the future

renowned astronomer is blinking at the shining Milky Way with but a

languid interest poor little chap!--and wondering what has become of that

other one they call the wet-nurse. In another the future great historian

is lying--and doubtless will continue to lie until his earthly mission is

ended. In another the future President is busying himself with no

profounder problem of state than what the mischief has become of his hair

so early; and in a mighty array of other cradles there are now some

60,000 future office-seekers, getting ready to furnish him occasion to

grapple with that same old problem a second, time. And in still one

more cradle, some where under the flag, the future illustrious

commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his

approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole

strategic mind at this moment to trying to find out some way to get his

big toe into his mouth--an achievement which, meaning no disrespect, the

illustrious guest of this evening turned his entire attention to some

fifty-six years ago; and if the child is but a prophecy of the man,

there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.

OUR CHILDREN AND GREAT DISCOVERIES

DELIVERED AT THE AUTHORS' CLUB, NEW YORK

Our children--yours--and--mine. They seem like little things to talk

about--our children, but little things often make up the sum of human

life--that's a good sentence. I repeat it, little things often produce

great things. Now, to illustrate, take Sir Isaac Newton--I presume some

of you have heard of Mr. Newton. Well, once when Sir Isaac Newton

--a mere lad--got over into the man's apple orchard--I don't know

what he was doing there--I didn't come all the way from Hartford to

q-u-e-s-t-i-o-n Mr. Newton's honesty--but when he was there--in the main

orchard--he saw an apple fall and he was a-t-t-racted toward it, and that

led to the discovery--not of Mr. Newton but of the great law of

attraction and gravitation.

And there was once another great discoverer--I've forgotten his name,

and I don't remember what he discovered, but I know it was something very

important, and I hope you will all tell your children about it when you

get home. Well, when the great discoverer was once loafn' around down in

Virginia, and a-puttin' in his time flirting with Pocahontas--oh!

Captain John Smith, that was the man's name--and while he and Poca were

sitting in Mr. Powhatan's garden, he accidentally put his arm around her

and picked something simple weed, which proved to be tobacco--and now we

find it in every Christian family, shedding its civilizing influence

broadcast throughout the whole religious community.

Now there was another great man, I can't think of his name either, who

used to loaf around and watch the great chandelier in the cathedral at

Pisa., which set him to thinking about the great law of gunpowder, and

eventually led to the discovery of the cotton-gin.

Now, I don't say this as an inducement for our young men to loaf around

like Mr. Newton and Mr. Galileo and Captain Smith, but they were once

little babies two days old, and they show what little things have

sometimes accomplished.

EDUCATING THEATRE-GOERS

The children of the Educational Alliance gave a performance of

"The Prince and the Pauper" on the afternoon of April 14, 1907,

in the theatre of the Alliance Building in East Broadway. The

audience was composed of nearly one thousand children of the

neighborhood. Mr. Clemens, Mr. Howells, and Mr. Daniel Frohman

were among the invited guests.

I have not enjoyed a play so much, so heartily, and so thoroughly since I

played Miles Hendon twenty-two years ago. I used to play in this piece

("The Prince and the Pauper") with my children, who, twenty-two years

ago, were little youngsters. One of my daughters was the Prince, and a

neighbor's daughter was the Pauper, and the children of other neighbors

played other parts. But we never gave such a performance as we have seen

here to-day. It would have been beyond us.

My late wife was the dramatist and stage-manager. Our coachman was the

stage-manager, second in command. We used to play it in this simple way,

and the one who used to bring in the crown on a cushion--he was a little

fellow then--is now a clergyman way up high--six or seven feet high--and

growing higher all the time. We played it well, but not as well as you

see it here, for you see it done by practically trained professionals.

I was especially interested in the scene which we have just had, for

Miles Hendon was my part. I did it as well as a person could who never

remembered his part. The children all knew their parts. They did not

mind if I did not know mine. I could thread a needle nearly as well as

the player did whom you saw to-day. The words of my part I could supply

on the spot. The words of the song that Miles Hendon sang here I did not

catch. But I was great in that song.

[Then Mr. Clemens hummed a bit of doggerel that the reporter

made out as this:

"There was a woman in her town,

She loved her husband well,

But another man just twice as well."

"How is that?" demanded Mr. Clemens. Then resuming]

It was so fresh and enjoyable to make up a new set of words each time

that I played the part.

If I had a thousand citizens in front of me, I would like to give them

information, but you children already know all that I have found out

about the Educational Alliance. It's like a man living within thirty

miles of Vesuvius and never knowing about a volcano. It's like living

for a lifetime in Buffalo, eighteen miles from Niagara, and never going

to see the Falls. So I had lived in New York and knew nothing about the

Educational Alliance.

This theatre is a part of the work, and furnishes pure and clean plays.

This theatre is an influence. Everything in the world is accomplished by

influences which train and educate. When you get to be seventy-one and a

half, as I am, you may think that your education is over, but it isn't.

If we had forty theatres of this kind in this city of four millions, how

they would educate and elevate! We should have a body of educated

theatre-goers.

It would make better citizens, honest citizens. One of the best gifts a

millionaire could make would be a theatre here and a theatre there. It

would make of you a real Republic, and bring about an educational level.

THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE

On November 19, 1907, Mr. Clemens entertained a party of six or

seven hundred of his friends, inviting them to witness the

representation of "The Prince and the Pauper," flayed by boys

and girls of the East Side at the Children's Educational

Theatre, New York.

Just a word or two to let you know how deeply I appreciate the honor

which the children who are the actors and frequenters of this cozy

playhouse have conferred upon me. They have asked me to be their

ambassador to invite the hearts and brains of New York to come down here

and see the work they are doing. I consider it a grand distinction to be

chosen as their intermediary. Between the children and myself there is

an indissoluble bond of friendship.

I am proud of this theatre and this performance--proud, because I am

naturally vain--vain of myself and proud of the children.

I wish we could reach more children at one time. I am glad to see that

the children of the East Side have turned their backs on the Bowery

theatres to come to see the pure entertainments presented here.

This Children's Theatre is a great educational institution. I hope the

time will come when it will be part of every public school in the land.

I may be pardoned in being vain. I was born vain, I guess. [At this

point the stage-manager's whistle interrupted Mr. Clemens.] That settles

it; there's my cue to stop. I was to talk until the whistle blew, but it

blew before I got started. It takes me longer to get started than most

people. I guess I was born at slow speed. My time is up, and if you'll

keep quiet for two minutes I'll tell you something about Miss Herts, the

woman who conceived this splendid idea. She is the originator and the

creator of this theatre. Educationally, this institution coins the gold

of young hearts into external good.

[On April 23, 1908, he spoke again at the same place]

I will be strictly honest with you; I am only fit to be honorary

president. It is not to be expected that I should be useful as a real

president. But when it comes to things ornamental I, of course, have no

objection. There is, of course, no competition. I take it as a very

real compliment because there are thousands of children who have had a

part in this request. It is promotion in truth.

It is a thing worth doing that is done here. You have seen the children

play. You saw how little Sally reformed her burglar. She could reform

any burglar. She could reform me. This is the only school in which can

be taught the highest and most difficult lessons--morals. In other

schools the way of teaching morals is revolting. Here the children who

come in thousands live through each part.

They are terribly anxious for the villain to get his bullet, and that I

take to be a humane and proper sentiment. They spend freely the ten

cents that is not saved without a struggle. It comes out of the candy

money, and the money that goes for chewing-gum and other necessaries of

life. They make the sacrifice freely. This is the only school which

they are sorry to leave.

POETS AS POLICEMEN

Mr. Clemens was one of the speakers at the Lotos Club dinner to

Governor Odell, March 24, 1900. The police problem was

referred to at length.

Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a

squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love. I would

be very glad to serve as commissioner, not because I think I am

especially qualified, but because I am too tired to work and would like

to take a rest.

Howells would go well as my deputy. He is tired too, and needs a rest

badly.

I would start in at once to elevate, purify, and depopulate the red-light

district. I would assign the most soulful poets to that district,

all heavily armed with their poems. Take Chauncey Depew as a sample.

I would station them on the corners after they had rounded up all the

depraved people of the district so they could not escape, and then have

them read from their poems to the poor unfortunates. The plan would be

very effective in causing an emigration of the depraved element.

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON DRAMATIZED

When Mr. Clemens arrived from Europe in 1895 one of the first

things he did was to see the dramatization of Pudd'nhead

Wilson. The audience becoming aware of the fact that Mr.

Clemens was in the house called upon him for a speech.

Never in my life have I been able to make a speech without preparation,

and I assure you that this position in which I find myself is one totally

unexpected.

I have been hemmed in all day by William Dean Howells and other frivolous

persons, and I have been talking about everything in the world except

that of which speeches are constructed. Then, too, seven days on the

water is not conducive to speech-making. I will only say that I

congratulate Mr. Mayhew; he has certainly made a delightful play out of

my rubbish. His is a charming gift. Confidentially I have always had

an idea that I was well equipped to write plays, but I have never

encountered a manager who has agreed with me.

DALY THEATRE

ADDRESS AT A DINNER AFTER THE ONE HUNDREDTH PERFORMANCE OF

"THE TAMING OF THE SHREW."

Mr. Clemens made the following speech, which he incorporated

afterward in Following the Equator.

I am glad to be here. This is the hardest theatre in New York to get

into, even at the front door. I never, got in without hard work. I am

glad we have got so far in at last. Two or three years ago I had an

appointment to meet Mr. Daly on the stage of this theatre at eight

o'clock in the evening. Well, I got on a train at Hartford to come to

New York and keep the appointment. All I had to do was to come to the

back door of the theatre on Sixth Avenue. I did not believe that; I did

not believe it could be on Sixth Avenue, but that is what Daly's note

said--come to that door, walk right in, and keep the appointment. It

looked very easy. It looked easy enough, but I had not much confidence

in the Sixth Avenue door.

Well, I was kind of bored on the train, and I bought some newspapers--New

Haven newspapers--and there was not much news in them, so I read the

advertisements. There was one advertisement of a bench-show. I had

heard of bench-shows, and I often wondered what there was about them to

interest people. I had seen bench-shows--lectured to bench-shows, in

fact--but I didn't want to advertise them or to brag about them. Well,

I read on a little, and learned that a bench-show was not a bench-show

--but dogs, not benches at all--only dogs. I began to be interested,

and as there was nothing else to do I read every bit of the

advertisement, and learned that the biggest thing in this show was a St.

Bernard dog that weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds. Before I got

to New York I was so interested in the bench-shows that I made up my mind

to go to one the first chance I got. Down on Sixth Avenue, near where

that back door might be, I began to take things leisurely. I did not

like to be in too much of a hurry. There was not anything in sight that

looked like a back door. The nearest approach to it was a cigar store.

So I went in and bought a cigar, not too expensive, but it cost enough to

pay for any information I might get and leave the dealer a fair profit.

Well, I did not like to be too abrupt, to make the man think me crazy, by

asking him if that was the way to Daly's Theatre, so I started gradually

to lead up to the subject, asking him first if that was the way to Castle

Garden. When I got to the real question, and he said he would show me

the way, I was astonished. He sent me through a long hallway, and I

found myself in a back yard. Then I went through a long passageway and

into a little room, and there before my eyes was a big St. Bernard dog

lying on a bench. There was another door beyond and I went there, and

was met by a big, fierce man with a fur cap on and coat off, who

remarked, "Phwat do yez want?" I told him I wanted to see Mr. Daly.

"Yez can't see Mr. Daly this time of night," he responded. I urged that

I had an appointment with Mr. Daly, and gave him my card, which did not

seem to impress him much. "Yez can't get in and yez can't shmoke here.

Throw away that cigar. If yez want to see Mr. Daly, yez 'll have to be

after going to the front door and buy a ticket, and then if yez have luck

and he's around that way yez may see him." I was getting discouraged,

but I had one resource left that had been of good service in similar

emergencies. Firmly but kindly I told him my name was Mark Twain, and I

awaited results. There was none. He was not fazed a bit. "Phwere's

your order to see Mr. Daly?" he asked. I handed him the note, and he

examined it intently. "My friend," I remarked, "you can read that better

if you hold it the other side up." But he took no notice of the

suggestion, and finally asked: "Where's Mr. Daly's name?" "There it is,"

I told him, "on the top of the page." "That's all right," he said,

"that's where he always puts it; but I don't see the 'W' in his name,"

and he eyed me distrustfully. Finally, he asked, "Phwat do yez want to

see Mr. Daly for?" "Business." "Business?" "Yes." It was my only

hope. "Phwat kind--theatres?" that was too much. "No." "What kind of

shows, then?" "Bench-shows." It was risky, but I was desperate."

Bench--shows, is it--where?" The big man's face changed, and he began to

look interested. "New Haven." "New Haven, it is? Ah, that's going to

be a fine show. I'm glad to see you. Did you see a big dog in the other

room?" "Yes." "How much do you think that dog weighs?" "One hundred

and forty-five pounds." "Look at that, now! He's a good judge of dogs,

and no mistake. He weighs all of one hundred and thirty-eight. Sit down

and shmoke--go on and shmoke your cigar, I'll tell Mr. Daly you are

here." In a few minutes I was on the stage shaking hands with Mr. Daly,

and the big man standing around glowing with satisfaction. "Come around

in front," said Mr. Daly, "and see the performance. I will put you into

my own box." And as I moved away I heard my honest friend mutter, "Well,

he desarves it."

THE DRESS OF CIVILIZED WOMAN

A large part of the daughter of civilization is her dress--as it should

be. Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress, and

some would lose all of it. The daughter Of modern civilization dressed

at her utmost best is a marvel of exquisite and beautiful art and

expense. All the lands, all the climes, and all the arts are laid under

tribute to furnish her forth. Her linen is from Belfast, her robe is

from Paris, her lace is from Venice, or Spain, or France, her feathers

are from the remote regions of Southern Africa, her furs from the remoter

region of the iceberg and the aurora, her fan from Japan, her diamonds

from Brazil, her bracelets from California, her pearls from Ceylon, her

cameos from Rome. She has gems and trinkets from buried Pompeii, and

others that graced comely Egyptian forms that have been dust and ashes

now for forty centuries. Her watch is from Geneva, her card case is from

China, her hair is from--from--I don't know where her hair is from; I

never could find out; that is, her other hair--her public hair, her

Sunday hair; I don't mean the hair she goes to bed with.

And that reminds me of a trifle. Any time you want to you can glance

around the carpet of a Pullman car, and go and pick up a hair-pin; but

not to save your life can you get any woman in that car to acknowledge

that hair-pin. Now, isn't that strange? But it's true. The woman who

has never swerved from cast-iron veracity and fidelity in her whole life

will, when confronted with this crucial test, deny her hair-pin. She

will deny that hair-pin before a hundred witnesses. I have stupidly got

into more trouble and more hot water trying to hunt up the owner of a

hair-pin in a Pullman than by any other indiscretion of my life.

DRESS REFORM AND COPYRIGHT

When the present copyright law was under discussion, Mr.

Clemens appeared before the committee. He had sent Speaker

Cannon the following letter:

"DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of Congress, not

next week but right away. It is very necessary. Do accomplish

this for your affectionate old friend right away--by,

persuasion if you can, by violence if you must, for it is

imperatively necessary that I get on the floor of the House for

two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in

behalf of support; encouragement, and protection of one of the

nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature.

I have arguments with me--also a barrel with liquid in it.

"Give me a chance. Get me the thanks of Congress. Don't wait

for others--there isn't time; furnish them to me yourself and

let Congress ratify later. I have stayed away and let Congress

alone for seventy-one years and am entitled to the thanks.

Congress knows this perfectly well, and I have long felt hurt

that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has

been merely felt by the House and never publicly uttered.

"Send me an order on the sergeant-at-arms quick. When shall I

come?

"With love and a benediction,

"MARK TWAIN."

While waiting to appear before the committee, My. Clemens

talked to the reporters:

Why don't you ask why I am wearing such apparently unseasonable clothes?

I'll tell you. I have found that when a man reaches the advanced age of

seventy-one years, as I have, the continual sight of dark clothing is

likely to have a depressing effect upon him. Light-colored clothing is

more pleasing to the eye and enlivens the spirit. Now, of course, I

cannot compel every one to wear such clothing just for my especial

benefit, so I do the next best thing and wear it myself.

Of course, before a man reaches my years the fear of criticism might

prevent him from indulging his fancy. I am not afraid of that. I am

decidedly for pleasing color combinations in dress. I like to see the

women's clothes, say, at the opera. What can be more depressing than the

sombre black which custom requires men to wear upon state occasions?

A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is

just about as inspiring.

After all, what is the purpose of clothing? Are not clothes intended

primarily to preserve dignity and also to afford comfort to their wearer?

Now I know of nothing more uncomfortable than the present-day clothes of

men. The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course,

society demands something more than this.

The best-dressed man I have ever seen, however, was a native of the

Sandwich Islands who attracted my attention thirty years ago. Now, when

that man wanted to don especial dress to honor a public occasion or a

holiday, why, he occasionally put on a pair of spectacles. Otherwise the

clothing with which God had provided him sufficed.

Of course, I have ideas of dress reform. For one thing, why not adopt

some of the women's styles? Goodness knows, they adopt enough of ours.

Take the peek-a-boo waist, for instance. It has the obvious advantages

of being cool and comfortable, and in addition it is almost always made

up in pleasing colors which cheer and do not depress.

It is true that I dressed the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court

in a plug-hat, but, let's see, that was twenty-five years ago. Then no

man was considered fully dressed until he donned a plug-hat. Nowadays I

think that no man is dressed until he leaves it home. Why, when I left

home yesterday they trotted out a plug-hat for me to wear.

"You must wear it," they told me; "why, just think of going to Washington

without a plug-hat!" But I said no; I would wear a derby or nothing.

Why, I believe I could walk along the streets of New York--I never do

--but still I think I could--and I should never see a well-dressed man

wearing a plug-hat. If I did I should suspect him of something. I don't

know just what, but I would suspect him.

Why, when I got up on the second story of that Pennsylvania ferry-boat

coming down here yesterday I saw Howells coming along. He was the only

man on the boat with a plug-hat, and I tell you he felt ashamed of

himself. He said he had been persuaded to wear it against his better

sense. But just think of a man nearly seventy years old who has not a

mind of his own on such matters!

"Are you doing any work now?" the youngest and most serious reporter

asked.

Work? I retired from work on my seventieth birthday. Since then I have

been putting in merely twenty-six hours a day dictating my autobiography,

which, as John Phoenix said in regard to his autograph, may be relied

upon as authentic, as it is written exclusively by me. But it is not to

be published in full until I am thoroughly dead. I have made it as

caustic, fiendish, and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes,

and I shall continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the

angels. It is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the

hair of some folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and

the persons mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are

dead. It is something awful!

"Can you tell us the names of some of the notables that are here to see

you off?"

I don't know. I am so shy. My shyness takes a peculiar phase. I never

look a person in the face. The reason is that I am afraid they may know

me and that I may not know them, which makes it very embarrassing for

both of us. I always wait for the other person to speak. I know lots of

people, but I don't know who they are. It is all a matter of ability to

observe things. I never observe anything now. I gave up the habit years

ago. You should keep a habit up if you want to become proficient in it.

For instance, I was a pilot once, but I gave it up, and I do not believe

the captain of the Minneapolis would let me navigate his ship to London.

Still, if I think that he is not on the job I may go up on the bridge and

offer him a few suggestions.

COLLEGE GIRLS

Five hundred undergraduates, under the auspices of the Woman's

University Club, New York, welcomed Mr. Clemens as their guest,

April 3, 1906, and gave him the freedom of the club, which the

chairman explained was freedom to talk individually to any girl

present.

I've worked for the public good thirty years, so for the rest of my life

I shall work for my personal contentment. I am glad Miss Neron has fed

me, for there is no telling what iniquity I might wander into on an empty

stomach--I mean, an empty mind.

I am going to tell you a practical story about how once upon a time I was

blind--a story I should have been using all these months, but I never

thought about telling it until the other night, and now it is too late,

for on the nineteenth of this month I hope to take formal leave of the

platform forever at Carnegie Hall--that is, take leave so far as talking

for money and for people who have paid money to hear me talk. I shall

continue to infest the platform on these conditions--that there is nobody

in the house who has paid to hear me, that I am not paid to be heard, and

that there will be none but young women students in the audience. [Here

Mr. Clemens told the story of how he took a girl to the theatre while he

was wearing tight boots, which appears elsewhere in this volume, and

ended by saying: "And now let this be a lesson to you--I don't know what

kind of a lesson; I'll let you think it out."]

GIRLS

In my capacity of publisher I recently received a manuscript from a

teacher which embodied a number of answers given by her pupils to

questions propounded. These answers show that the children had nothing

but the sound to go by--the sense was perfectly empty. Here are some of

their answers to words they were asked to define: Auriferous--pertaining

to an orifice; ammonia--the food of the gods; equestrian--one who asks

questions; parasite--a kind of umbrella; ipecaca--man who likes a good

dinner. And here is the definition of an ancient word honored by a great

party: Republican--a sinner mentioned in the Bible. And here is an

innocent deliverance of a zoological kind: "There are a good many donkeys

in the theological gardens." Here also is a definition which really

isn't very bad in its way: Demagogue--a vessel containing beer and other

liquids. Here, too, is a sample of a boy's composition on girls, which,

I must say, I rather like:

"Girls are very stuckup and dignified in their manner and behaveyour.

They think more of dress than anything and like to play with dowls and

rags. They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of

guns. They stay at home all the time and go to church every Sunday.

They are al-ways sick. They are al-ways furry and making fun of boys

hands and they say how dirty. They cant play marbles. I pity them poor

things. They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them.

I don't belave they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every

nite and say, 'Oh, a'nt the moon lovely!'--Thir is one thing I have not

told and that is they al-ways now their lessons bettern boys."

THE LADIES

DELIVERED AT THE ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL, 1872, OF THE SCOTTISH

CORPORATION OF LONDON

Mr. Clemens replied to the toast "The Ladies."

I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to respond to this

especial toast, to "The Ladies," or to women if you please, for that is

the preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore

the more entitled to reverence. I have noticed that the Bible, with that

plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous characteristic of the

Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to even the illustrious

mother of all mankind as a "lady," but speaks of her as a woman. It is

odd, but you will find it is so. I am peculiarly proud of this honor,

because I think that the toast to women is one which, by right and by

every rule of gallantry, should take precedence of all others--of the

army, of the navy, of even royalty itself--perhaps, though the latter is

not necessary in this day and in this land, for the reason that, tacitly,

you do drink a broad general health to all good women when you drink the

health of the Queen of England and the Princess of Wales. I have in mind

a poem just now which is familiar to you all, familiar to everybody. And

what an inspiration that was, and how instantly the present toast recalls

the verses to all our minds when the most noble, the most gracious, the

purest, and sweetest of all poets says:

"Woman! O woman!---er

Wom----"

However, you remember the lines; and you remember how feelingly, how

daintily, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up before you,

feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman; and how, as

you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into worship of

the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere breath, mere

words. And you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet, with stern

fidelity to the history of all humanity, delivers this beautiful child of

his heart and his brain over to the trials and sorrows that must come to

all, sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how the pathetic story

culminates in that apostrophe--so wild, so regretful, so full of mournful

retrospection. The lines run thus:

"Alas!--alas!--a--alas!

----Alas!--------alas!"