Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field

_Tales They Told to a Fellow Correspondent_

By

Henry W. Fisher

[Illustration]

Nicholas L. Brown

New York MCMXXII

Copyright, 1922

_by_

Nicholas L. Brown

To

Marian Phelps

(_Mrs. Phelps-Peters_)

whose youth, beauty and cleverness delighted Mark Twain in his troubled Berlin days.

_Editor’S Note_

_Along in 1909, Fisher and I were working for the same newspaper, Fisher as a special writer and I in the art department. We both subsequently escaped, but that is another story. Just then I happened to be working on the_ BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN _(Harper, 1910). Fisher told me that he was going to do some magazine stories on Mark and promised to let me have proofs, but a week or two later he went away on one of his periodical trips to Europe, and I lost track of him for several years._

_Some time in 1921, I met him on Broadway, New York. “Hello, Fisher,” says I, “where have you been, what are you doing, and where are those flowing whiskers you used to sport?”_

_“Hello, Johnson,” replied Fisher, peering at me through his thick glasses, “I am just back from London, the air raids scared off my whiskers, and my eyesight has become so bad, I am only fit to be a ‘dictator’ now.”_

_“Well,” says I, continuing our conversation of many years ago, “where are those Mark Twain yarns you promised me?”_

_“In my head,” he said; “never had time to put them on paper.” “You know,” he added, “old Mark and I spent many weeks and months together in Berlin and Vienna and frequently met in London and Paris, not to mention more out-of-the-way places, and if I really put my mind to it, I can remember reams of Mark Twain’s sayings, while others are available in notebooks, diaries and such I kept off and on. And come to think of it, I can tell you about Eugene Field over there as well. I happened to occupy an editorial position in London, while Gene tried to set the Thames afire and--failed, poor chap.”_

_“Then,” says I, “come up to the studio any day, to-morrow if you like. I will have a stenographer there and you can start dictating your stories and we shall set the world laughing, putting them in a book.”_

_Fisher did, and here’s the book._

* * * * *

_Twain and Field did not expatriate themselves to the extent of other gifted Americans--Henry James, Bret Harte, Whistler, Abbey and Sargent--yet Twain settled down for months, and even years, in various European countries, while Field tried, during a hundred days or more, to make a go of it in London, before capitulating to climate and home-hunger._

_Previous glimpses of these two great American humorists during their several sojourns in Europe have come to us almost wholly through their letters to friends at home. Of course, a man reveals himself to a great extent in his private correspondence and diaries, but, even so, the picture is never complete; he cannot quite see himself as others see him. How Twain and Field appeared to another American in their strange environment is here set down for the first time._

_Fisher was in a unique position for contact with these men, both of whom he had met previously in the United States. He was one of the most widely known American correspondents in foreign parts; he had written for the Dalziel News Company (then a sort of United Press, dealing with the European continent) letters from Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Belgrade, Vienna, Budapest, etc., that were telegraphed all over the world. He had acted as correspondent for the New York Telegram, the New York World, the New York Sun, the London Evening News, the Paris Messenger and the St. James Gazette; he had written special articles for Harper’s Weekly, printed alongside of Mark Twain’s contributions. He knew, or at least had a smattering knowledge of, all European languages; he knew every European capital or resort by eyesight and insight; he had met the great personages of Europe. So it was quite in the nature of things that Mark and Field ran across Fisher at the common meeting places in foreign parts, the U. S. Embassies and Legations; likewise that these American writers accepted his guidance in the strange world they found themselves in._

_Paine, Twain’s great biographer, speaks of Fisher’s contact with the famous author (vol. II, p. 935, “Mark Twain: A Biography”). Fisher’s memory, trained by years of interviewing, when no notes could be taken in the presence of the interviewed, has retained the substance and the manner, if not always the exact language, used and exchanged._

_Some writers reveal themselves only in their written, carefully edited works, but Twain’s unique personality was as eminent, as inspiring and as lasting in his daily walks and talks as in his books and lectures. In so far as Fisher reproduces the meaning of Twain’s observations on persons and things abroad, these anecdotes are of value to all friends and admirers of the great humorist. The same applies to Eugene Field, though, of course, in a more limited degree._

_Merle Johnson._

_New York, January, 1922._

Contents

Page

Editor’s Note vii

Author’s Preface xv

How Mark Would Safeguard England 25

Mark Philosophized on Willie 33

Mark--Regicide 34

The Funniest Speech Mark Ever Heard 36

Monarchical Atavism 42

Democratic Mark and the Austrian Aristocracy 43

Phil Sheridan’s Friend 45

“Elizabeth Was a He,” Said Mark 47

Mark, the Sleight-of-hand Man 55

Mark and the Imperial Mistress 57

Mark on Lynch Law 59

Recollections of King Charles and Grant 62

Mark Missed Gallows-land 64

Think of Her Sorrows 66

Breaking the News Gently 67

Dukes and Unborn Car Horses 69

“Pa Used to Be a Terrible Man” 70

Mark on the Berlin Cops 71

The Sausage Room 74

Mark’s Glimpse of Schopenhauer 77

“Murderer” Blucher in Oxford 86

Mark’s Human Side 88

An Australian Surprise 90

Mark in France and Italy 92

Why Mark Wouldn’t Like to Die Abroad 93

The Left Hand Didn’t Know 95

American Humorists 96

Telepathy or Suggestion 97

Trying to Be Serious Didn’t Work 99

Assorted Beauties 100

Mark’s Children Knew Him 101

Mark, Dogs, Dagoes, and Cats 102

The Tragedy of Genius 103

Kilties and the Lassie 105

A Wise Provision of Providence 107

The Awful German Language 108

Artist or Photographer 110

Mark Interviewed the Barber about Harry Thaw 112

His Portrait--a Mirror 115

Mark, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Darwin 116

Mark at the Stock Exchange, Vienna 120

Mark and the Prussian Lieutenant 121

Mark Studies the Costermonger Language 123 That _Beautiful_ Funeral 125 Ada’s Beast of a Man 126 Jealousy in Lowland 127 The Troubles of Liz 128

The French Madame 130

The Great Disappointment 134

Rheumatism and Prodding 137

On Literary Friendships 138

Bayard Taylor’s German 139

Genius in Extremis 140

What May Happen to You after You Are Dead 143

Kings in Their Birthday Suits 146

Mark on Lincoln’s Humanity 147

An English Lover of Kings and a Hater 150

Mark Got Arrested in Berlin 154

Books that Weren’t Written 157

Mark Enjoyed Other Humorists 160

Mark and the English Hack-writer 162

Mark Thought Joan of Arc Was Slandered 164

Running Amuck--Almost 166

Mark’s Idiomatic Gems 167

Mark and the Girls that Love a Lord 168

Mark’s Martyrdom 173

Slang Not in Mark’s Dictionary 175

Mark “No Gentleman” 177

Mark, Poetry, and Art 178

Mark Sheds Light on English History 179

Mark Explains Dean Swift 183

Mark in Tragedy and Comedy 185

“Ambition Is a Jade that More Than One Man Can Ride” 190

Mark as a Translator 192

Mark in England 194

Why Mark Was Uncomfortable in the King of Sweden’s Presence 196

Mark’s Idea of High Art 197

Mark Meets King Leopold--Almost 199

Sizing Up of Aristocracy by Mark 201

The Bald-headed Woman 204

When a Publisher Dines and Wines You 205

Mark in Politics 208

Mark on “Royal Honors” 209

American Women the Prettiest 212

Where Tay Pay Isn’t Tay Pay 213

The Man Who Didn’t Get Used to Hanging 214

Stray Sayings of Mark 218

Eugene Field and His Troubles in Chicago 223

More of Eugene Field’s Trials in London 227

Gene, a “Success of Curiosity” 230

Dire Consequences of American Horseplay 233

Field’s Library of Humor 240

Those German Professors 241

Eugene Field and Northern Lore 243

Little Boy Blue 246

Preface

To begin with, of course, I don’t claim that _all_ these stories are absolutely first hand. I sometimes jotted down what I heard Mark say, or stored his talk in some compartment of memory, only to hear him repeat the yarn, after a space, in quite different fashion.

“You remind me of Charles II,” I said to him once, referring to that confusing habit of his, and was going to “substantiate” when he interrupted.

“I can guess what you mean, but never mind, for all you know I may be Charlie’s reincarnation. Charles, you wanted to say, had only three stories up his sleeve and these he told over and over again for new ones to Nell and the rest of the bunch. And varied them so cleverly and disguised them so well, that his audience never got on to the fact that His Majesty had been chestnutting. As for me, I can only hope that I will succeed as well as Charlie did.”

In Berlin I once heard Susie Clemens--ill-fated, talented girl, who died so young--say to her father: “Grouchy again! They _do_ say that you can be funny when company is around--too bad that you don’t consider Henry Fisher company.”

“Out of the mouth of sucklings,” quoth Clemens and gave Susie the twenty marks she was after, and he kissed her: “Good-by, little blackmailer, and don’t tell your mamma how you worked that fool papa of yours.”

Indeed, Mark was not always the humorist the public mind pictures him. Very often, for long hours at a time, in our intercourse extending over thirty years, he was decidedly serious, while at other times he grumbled at everything and everybody. His initial object in choosing me for his “bear-leader” was to add to his stock of knowledge on foreign affairs and to correct erroneous ideas he might have acquired from books. Since I had resided many years on the Continent, and had command of the languages he lacked, he asked me to pilot him around Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, and on such occasions his talk was more often deep and learned than laughter-provoking. In an afternoon or morning’s work--getting atmosphere, _i. e._, “the hang of things” German or Austrian, as Mark called it--he sometimes dropped two or three memorable witticisms, but familiar intercourse in the long run left no doubt of the fact that a very serious vein bordering on melancholy underlay his mask of bonhomie. On the other hand a closer or more intelligent student of life never lived. He was as conscientious, as true, and as simple as Washington Irving.

Those occasional lapses into dejection notwithstanding, it struck me that Mark extracted his humor out of the bounty and abundance of his own nature. Hence his tinkling grotesquerie, unconventionality, whimsicality, play of satire, and shrieking irony, between touches of deep seriousness.

Really much of Mark’s wisdom began and ended in humor and vice versa. There was originality and penetration in everything he said. Howells has said of Mark: “If a trust of his own was betrayed--Clemens was ruthlessly, implacably resentful.” For my part, in thirty years, I never heard him speak ill of any living person, except one or two self-appointed editors.

I first met him in Chicago during the Grant celebration, November, 1879, when I heard him give the toast on babies, but I do not remember a word of his speech, for while it lasted I was sitting next to Grant and Grant kept me busy watching and attending his immutable and eloquent silence.

When Mark and I were fellow correspondents in Berlin, I met his wife and family frequently at their home, at the Hotel Royal, and on public occasions. The three girls, Jean, Susie, and Clara, were in their teens, and both lovely and lively. At that time the late William Walter Phelps of New Jersey was American minister in Berlin. We had been friends in America and Phelps had also known Mr. Clemens in the States socially. Like everybody else, he delighted in Mark’s stimulating company. Among other distinguished Americans in Berlin, in 1891, was Ward Hill Lamon, Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield law partner, later his private secretary, and Marshal of the District of Columbia during Lincoln’s administration. Lamon was the author of “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” and “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln.” These books the Lincoln family did not enjoy.

When the Clemenses went to live in Vienna, six years later, I happened to be correspondent at the Austrian capital for Dalziel’s News, London, and Galignani’s Messenger, Paris, and as Mark, used to the Berlin dialect, found it difficult “to acclimatize his German, making it chime in with the Vienna variety” (his own description), I was again much in demand as interpreter, pathfinder, and general cicerone.

In later years I met Mark repeatedly during his several London seasons, for, liking his society, I called at Brown’s or his apartment whenever he came to England, myself being engaged in literary work there. We were never on terms of particular intimacy--hail-fellows-well-met, yes! “Hello, Mark”--“Hello Henry W.--you here again?” We stuck verbally to the formula of the old Chicago days, and I was glad to be of use to him when it suited his fancy. Moreover, I was vastly interested in Mark’s books, short stories, and essays, but found him rarely inclined to talk shop unless it was the other fellow’s.

Rudyard Kipling he used to designate “the militant spokesman of the Anglo-Saxon races,” and he sometimes spoke with near-admiration of Bernard Shaw, “whose plays are popular from London to St. Petersburg, from Christiania to Madrid, from Havre to Frisco, and from Frisco to the Antipodes, while mine are nowhere.”

After I visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana he said to me: “Lucky dog, you have broken bread with the man who commands, and almost monopolizes, the thought of the world.”

That the universality of his humor and its humanity made him the peer of these great writers, of all his contemporaries in fact, seemed to be far from his thoughts. His verbal humor, like his fancy, was as simple in form and as direct in application as were the army orders of the great Napoleon. He liked to hear me say that, for he knew that some of my forbears had been individually attached to the person of the Emperor. But the most he ever said concerning his authorship and other writers in his own line was this:

“I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. Like you and Susie” (referring to his oldest daughter) “I can’t spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a ‘k’ to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.”

One more of his sayings: At the unveiling of a bronze tablet to Eugene Field, Mark uttered these words:

“By his life he made bright the lives of all who knew him and by his books he cheered the thoughts of thousands who didn’t know him.”

Substitute “millions” for thousands and you have Mark Twain the Man and Mark Twain the Writer.

***

One afternoon, having laughed our fill with the “Belle of New York” and rejoiced in the London success of the piece (Mark, who while alive enjoyed scant luck as a playwright, yet loved to see others “win out”), our friend and the present writer happened to cross Bedford Square. Seeing the name at a street corner, Mark pulled out his notebook. “Eugene Field lived somewhere around here in 1889,” he said. I showed him the house, No. 20 Alfred Street.

“A dark and dismal hole,” said Mark, ruefully shaking his head; “no wonder he couldn’t find his ‘righteous stomach’ there, even in the absence of Chicago pies.”

“And _coffee_,” I interpolated. “Yours truly, too, would have died of dyspepsia if he had stayed in Chicago and continued at Henrici’s coffee and pie counter, as Gene did.”

Mark remained silent for a block or two. “I’ve got it,” he said at last, “God gave Gene a good enough stomach, and English hospitality completely paralyzed what was left of his digestive powers after the Cook County coffee and pie diet. Did you see much of Gene while he was in London?”

I told Mark all I knew about Field’s social and literary doings. “Bennett was right when he refused him a job on the London Herald,” said Clemens. “For one thing, the Herald didn’t last long, and the English climate would have cut poor Gene’s life still shorter by two or three winters and falls.”

Just the same, the desire for a London success, then common among American writers and artists, killed Eugene Field, the genial and lovable poet of childhood and man-about-literature’s-highways-and-byways.

Henry W. Fisher.

In the last days of December, 1921.

Abroad With Mark Twain

How Mark Would Safeguard England.[A]

“Not on your life,” said Mark Twain, in pajamas and dressing gown, lolling in his big armchair at Brown’s (“the only subdued and homelike inn left in London,” he used to call it)--“not if you bring the Bath Club (and tub) right into this suite so I don’t have to shock my good English friends by painting the town blue skipping across Dover Street in my dressing gown. By the way,” he added, winking an eye at Bram Stoker, “my daughter Clara bought me this--” (he held up the skirts of his bathrobe with both hands) “a most refined girl! If she wasn’t, would she have sent me a wire like this?

“‘Much worried by newspapers. Remember proprieties.’”

“And what did you answer?” asked Bram.

“None of your business! You are getting as fresh as a reporter,” snapped Twain, with mock severity, while looking at me.

In the meanwhile I consulted my notebook. “It’s sixteen years since the Kaiser--” I reopened the case--

“Oh, I have a notebook too. Wait a minute,” interrupted Twain. He gave his secretary directions, and presently read from an old, much worn diary, sustaining my date-line as it were--

“... since this democratic lamb and the Imperial lion laid down together, a little General providing grub--”

“Sixteen years is a long time, and if the Kaiser imposed silence upon you then and there, the lid is certainly off now,” I insisted. “Besides, at present, he’s got Nietzsche on the brain.”

“I don’t care whether Annie Besant and William Jennings Bryan occupy lofts in his upper story,” said Twain. “I had promised Von Versen” (the General and Mark’s relation) “not to talk about that jamboree, and the worms, if interested, will have to turn burglars and jimmy my brain cells, where memories of the banquet are stored, for I swear I’ll leave no skeleton key.”

“Pshaw! You are still sore because Willie wouldn’t let you get in a word edgewise,” said Stoker.

“Man alive!” cried Twain, “his talk was selling books for me. I was in rotten bad shape then financially, doing syndicate work for ‘The Sun’ and ‘McClure’s’. Could I afford to say, ‘Can your talk, Willie’?--like poverty, they have you with them always--but I am here for a short time only--my turn to stir up the animals.”

We agreed that if an emperor climbs the dizzy heights of bookmongerdom he ought to have all the rope he wants.

“And did you like the British better than the Berlin brand of king?” was asked.

“They let me do a lot of talking at Windsor,” evaded honest Mark. “I like these folks immensely. Ed is a manly fellow, despite his Hoboken accent--no wonder he fought with his ma, who wore the pants while Albert was alive, and tried to impose her German policies on her successor-to-be. Ed recalled an indigestion which we both entertained at Homburg, at the Elizabeth Spa there, which is more kinds of pure salt than Kissingen even. The blonde Fräulein who had sold us the liquid caviar advised walking it off, and as stomachache inclines to democracy the same as toothache, I didn’t mind tramping with Ed, though I fancied that I would hear more about royal inner works than was decent for a minister’s son.”

“Did you tell the King any yarns?”

“Well, he referred to my giving out that interview about the news of my death being greatly exaggerated, and was pleased to call it funny. When I said that everybody more or less was given to overstatement, Ed commented, dryly, ‘Especially my nephew of Germany.’ So I told the story of the Russian Jew who claimed to have been chased by 47 wolves.

“‘You probably were so frightened you saw double,’ suggested the magistrate.

“‘There were 12 at least,’ insisted Isaac.

“‘Won’t half a dozen do?’

“‘As I live, there were seven.’

“‘Now tell the truth, Isaac. There was one wolf--one is enough to frighten a little Israelite like you.’

“Isaac, glad of saving one out of 47, nodded.

“‘But maybe the creature wasn’t a wolf at all!’

“‘No wolf!’ cried Isaac, ‘what else could he be? Didn’t he have four legs, and didn’t he wag his tail?’

“After that Ed turned me over to the Queen and a tribe of Princes and Princesses, who all seemed much relieved when I solemnly informed them that I had no intention of buying Windsor Castle this trip. Then we talked commonplaces until Alexandra commanded me to put on my hat lest I catch cold, which gave me a chance to tell about Will Penn. Penn, you’ll remember, insisted on wearing his hat everywhere. When he saw King Charles, the second of his name, doff his chapeau at a court function, the future Philadelphian inquired:

“‘Friend Charles, why dost thou take off thy lid?’

“‘Because,’ answered Charles, ‘it is customary at court that only one may remain covered in the King’s presence.’

“I was ashamed, cracking that chestnut,” said Mark, “but Alexandra and the youngsters seemed to think it a real side-splitter to judge by the noise they made.”

“Nice people,” said Bram.

“You bet,” spoke Mark emphatically, “and that’s why I’ll have a word or two with the War Office of this here realm before I quit. I have been thinking, you know. When we got through with the grub at General Versen’s and retired to the smoking room, that Kaiser, in the meantime reinforced by a lot of his officers that came in for beer, pretzels and cigars--that Kaiser worked himself up into a fine frenzy about his U-boats. His Germania Shipyards at Kiel (they were really Krupps, but he was the principal stockholder) would turn out better and bigger U-boats, he said, than the French and English could ever hope to build. And when he had enough of them, with all the improvements science and technique could provide--then beware, proud Albion!

“Invasion was the least he threatened unless England helped him exterminate France.

“‘It was the easiest thing in the world,’ boasted William, ‘a hundred U-boats operating against England, Scotland and Ireland simultaneously could pull off the trick in a day or two.’”

Mark lit a fresh cigar, tilted his feet as high as the chiffonier allowed and developed what he was pleased to call his “strategy.”

“You see,” he said, “the waters ’round these islands are charted to the last half pint. The British Admiralty knows the bottom as well as the surface and the coast. Now suppose Willie or any other divinely Appointed One (I don’t think, though, there is another as foolish and reckless as he) should attempt to carry out that invasion threat. Mind, its possibilities are not denied by British strategists; I have made inquiries. Now, to meet invasion in the old orthodox way would cost a million lives, a thousand millions in treasure, and, after all, the result would be problematical.

“To make defeat of the invasion plans certain, we must forestall execution. And the only way to do that is to stew those U-boats in their own electric fat--juice, I mean. See my point?”

Bram and I said we did, “but--” and Twain, knowing that we were lying like thieves, explained:

“In time of peace, et cetera.... In this case (I will have the device patented, of course) we will build a steel fence all around the three kingdoms, height to be determined by local conditions. In all cases it will be so graduated as to allow the biggest ocean liner to pass over, yet high enough to bar the biggest and the smallest U-boat pirate. Are you on?” asked Mark.

Bram said he was, but I couldn’t tell another lie before luncheon.

“Well, it’s this way, you duffer,” said Mark, “somewhere, everywhere on the English, Scottish and Irish coasts, immense dynamos will be established--these with no fancy brushes, mark you--to connect with certain points of my steel fence by naked cables.

“The British Admiralty will know, of course, when the U-boat armada sets out, and will turn on the current when and where it will do the most harm. Now the moment a U-boat touches my fence, out of business it goes, goes for good, but at the same time its agony will start. For my fence will be magnetized as well as electrified, and though the U-boat is momentarily repulsed, it is held, at the same time, captive by a giant magnet.

“Think of the fine time the enemy crew will have,” chuckled Twain, “with ten thousands of volts pumped into their vessel at the bottom of the sea, the magnet preventing its getaway.

“Boys,” he continued, “I would like to sit on top of Big Ben” (in the tower of Parliament House, London) “and direct the electric strokes myself.”

“And this epoch-making invention of yours, will you present it to Great Britain as a free gift?”

“Not I,” said Twain. “I have a family to look after. I intend to get a round million sterling from the War Office here. And if the British refuse to pay, why, when you come to think of it, we have quite a long coast line in the United States--”

While Mark was speaking, Sir Thomas Lipton came in with a newspaper poster, four days old, that read:

Mark Twain Arrives Ascot Cup Stolen

And that turned the conversation into other channels.

Footnotes:

[A] London, June 24th or 25th, 1907, a few days after the famous Royal Garden Party at Windsor, where Mark had been lionized. Persons present, Mark Twain and secretary, Bram Stoker, and author.

Mark Philosophized On Willie

Mark had attended a masked ball at the Berlin Palace and was asked what he thought of William Hohenzollern dressed up as Frederick the Great. “He reminded me of the little speech addressed by a Cossack Chief to Orloff, the lover of Catharine of Russia. Orloff visited the chief wearing a French court costume. The Cossack began to laugh.

“‘What is there to laugh at?’ demanded Orloff in a rage.

“‘I laugh because you shaved your face to look young and put flour in your hair to look old--both things at the same time,’ replied the Barbarian.

“As to William, he reminded me of still another thing; namely, the thigh-bone of a Saint I was introduced to in Italy and which, they said, belonged to a famous preacher of old. I turned the bone, which was encased in glass, gold and precious stones, over and over, yet could get no notion of the quality of its original owner’s sermons.”

Mark--Regicide

“I have been reading up on the laws dealing with regicide,” I heard Mark Twain tell Minister Phelps one morning in dead seriousness, “and do you know what they are going to do with me? Three or four things.

“First, they will cut my right hand off, and then hit me on the mouth with it, by way of reproof, I suppose. Second, they’ll hari-kari me and build a little fire to do my insides brown--all the time keeping me alive for the rest of the show. That will take some stimulants, I reckon.

“Third, they’ll hang me by the neck until I am stone dead. Whether I will get my inards and my hand back before they send me to wormland, I don’t know.”

“What _are_ you talking about?” queried Mr. Phelps.

“Why, you made me admit yesterday to Count Seckendorff that the judge who sent Charles the First to the block was a near relative of mine. Now, as soon as Willie hears about that, he will have my hands, my inards or anything else he craves of my anatomy.”

Of course, everybody roared, and Mr. Phelps had to explain that at dinner the night before, one of the guests, the nobleman mentioned, who was the favorite of the Empress Frederick, had boasted a lot of his ancestry; grandfathers and uncles of his had been present at every great battle the world over and had, of course, always fought on the winning side. Later, when the company was looking at some engravings, Mr. Phelps, in a joke, pointed to the figure of a Puritan, saying, with a merry twinkle in his eye:

“Ancestor of mine.”

The picture happened to illustrate the trial of Charles the First of England. Now, not to be outdone, Twain pointed to the Lord Judge on the woolsack, and matched Phelps’ lie.

“_My_ ancestor, if you please.” He made the statement at the very moment when Count Seckendorff looked at the picture. Hence, Mark’s awful apprehensions.

“Regicide,” he told us, “is never outlawed by the lapse of time. When Charles the First’s son was restored to the throne, hundreds of dead regicides were pulled out of their graves by the ears and hanged and quartered. As to the living, they were treated as I described, and I am afraid that if Seckendorff reports me (Willie being half English) I will be punished just as if I had made Charles a head shorter myself, yesterday afternoon.”

The Funniest Speech Mark Ever Heard

“The funniest thing I ever heard was chirped right here in this neighborhood,” said Mark Twain, snuggling down in his big armchair before the fire, which wasn’t blazing, and “didn’t mean to--without kerosene” (he told the maid, warning her not to let the “Missus” know).

The “neighborhood” was Tedworth Square, London, “quite the other side of Mayfair,” and leading to some queer streetlets and lanes.

“London’s Fifth Avenues,” mused Mark, “remind me of a sable coat (such as Pauline Bonaparte used to wear) edged with cat-skin: There are always Hell-kitchens within hailing distance.

“Well, at that time my girls had a friend living in Clapham, and nightly she walked me ten or more blocks to her bus through one of those Hell-kitchens lined with fried-fish shops and other ill-smelling emporiums for acquisitioning lucre.”

He turned to an English friend:

“Maybe ‘lined’ isn’t correct, for the fish shops were all on one side of the lane, and naturally I ambled along the other. I thought I was safe there, but of course I wasn’t, for the smells zigzagged across the pavement and followed me like a rotten conscience. My haven of safety, or comparative safety, from the rancid oil compost was an undertaker’s shop at the lane’s extreme end. When I got there, I used to hoist up my coat-tails and skip across the street right into the Public ’Ouse opposite for a Scotch. Naturally I took more or less interest in that cemetery-correspondence school. From a notice posted, I learned that it was under ‘new management’--I call that an ingenious appeal for corpses, don’t you?

“Well, it wasn’t merely an office, the carpentry was right at the tail of the roll topper; there, night after night, an old, sad-faced man sat, looking for customers. Now, the English metropolis is reputed the healthiest city in the world, which proves that the legend about cleanliness being nearest to godliness is blooming rot, for London is ten times dirtier than Berlin, seven and a half times dirtier than New York and six times dirtier than the best parts of Paris. Anyhow, that man-hyena, hungry for worm-food, didn’t enjoy the low rate of mortality one single bit. I could see that every time I eyed him, and I lamped him regularly before I waltzed into the gin-mill to drown the fried-fish smell.”

“And did _one_ Scotch suffice for the operation?” asked Mr. Bell.

Mark looked at Mrs. Clemens and lied brazenly: “Yes, of course.” But as she had risen to go out and was walking toward the door, he added in an undertone: “One Scotch was like taking a bottle of perfume from the ten-cent store into a glue factory to paralyze the Cologne smell of a four-acre establishment of that sort.”

“To resume,” resumed Mark, “seeing each other nightly for a week or a week and a half, that undertaker chap and this here yellow journalist of literature got on famously, and our acquaintance, though by eyesight only, gradually blossomed into real brotherhood. Whenever I clapped eyes on the poor devil, I used to think: ‘I _do_ wish some one would have the heart to die. Why don’t the Gloomy Dean or His Grace of Canterbury oblige the poor shark?’

“And no doubt, observing my gray locks and general decrepitude, he calculated: ‘Time for him to kick the bucket--hope his wife will give me a chance to measure him for a ten-guinea wooden coat--yes, he looks good for ten guineas.’

“Anyhow,” said Mark, “I felt in my heart of hearts that I was worth more dead than alive to this person--rotten grammar, I know, but don’t let that muss up your tempers, gents--and while the idea of suicide was repugnant (I was making big money then, that is, I expected to rake in $100.00 or more next week) still I cudgeled my brain for ways and means to improve his business. It’s easy enough to promote a grocer’s or butcher’s trade; all you have to do is to get rid of your sour stomach at some Appetite Cure Factory, and pitch in anew with dill pickles and strong coffee and frankfurters and sweetbreads and deep-dish pies. But an undertaker’s! Really, I had no desire to pose for Madame Toussaud’s dead-uns. At the same time, no doggone friend of mine would die, giving me the chance to bury him at my expense. Running away from that fried-fish smell, I always felt like Henry the Eighth, when one of his half-dozen queens wouldn’t be introduced to the axe-man. Indeed, if that starving undertaker had been my own best enemy, I couldn’t have felt more sorry for him. But lo!--the silver lining to the cloud! One evening, as I approached the carcassery, my startled ears were assailed by that quaint ditty:

For we are the drunkenest lot Of the drunken Irish crew--

and, leaping forward like oiled lightning, I saw the undertaker at work in the rear of the shop.

“‘Bless me, if the ban isn’t broke,’ I thought, ‘and with this dent in the armor, Fate will waltz up plenty more diseased ones. It’s always thus.’

“Suiting my action to the classic monologue--‘thus’ is a beautiful word, isn’t it?--I peered through the side window, expecting the janitor of tenements-of-clay to be at work on a nine-foot coffin or thereabout--”

All the merriment fled from Mark Twain’s face and manner when he added: “Damme, if that God-forsaken corpse-slinger was not planing a _baby coffin_!

“That night I took three Scotch, and” (looking around) “I don’t care if Livy knows.”

“I thought you were going to tell a _funny_ one,” said one of us, after a while. Clemens had got rid of his emotion by that time. “Correct,” he drawled, “It happened a few days later, when I was working the fried-fish side of the lane. The street was quite deserted on account of the lateness of the hour and owing to the burial of herrings and crab-meat in innumerable stomachs, big and little. As I put on extra steam to reach the gin-mill before closing time, this pretty legend wafted across the moonbeams:

“‘I say, my little female doggie’ (as a matter of fact, the shorter and uglier word was used, but it isn’t good form, though one may mention ‘bull pups’ at Mrs. Van Astorbilt’s tea) ‘I say, my little female doggie, tell Mother if she has another litter by that crossing sweeper of hers, to take care to drown ’em before they grow up as big as you.’

“The lady speaking, or rather shrieking, repeated this admonition three or four times, and followed it up with a succession of oaths that I frankly envied her. Yes, indeed, her ‘female doggie,’ her ‘crossing sweeper,’ her ‘litter,’ and her brand of blasphemy filled me with obscene delight, and I chuckled over them for a week.”

After the laughter had subsided, Richard Harding Davis asked: “And what is a crossing sweeper, pray?”

“A compound of rags and dirt, fitted with a face and feet and a broom, who mops up the dirty pavement to save your spats, and curses you for a curmudgeon if you give him less than a ha’penny for his trouble.”

Monarchical Atavism

One day in Berlin, speaking of General Grant, Mark said, “I did not admire him so much for winning the war as for _ending_ the war. Peace--happiness--brotherhood--that is what we want in this world.”

“Here comes the Kaiser,” he continued, “and sends me tickets for his September review. Of course I will go. But I don’t care for military spectacles, or for militarism. Tolstoy was right in calling army life ‘a school for murder.’ In Germany to-day there are ten million men drilled to look upon the Kaiser as a god. And if the Kaiser says ‘kill’--they kill. And if he says ‘die for me’--they go out and get themselves shot. The blame and shame rest with the big and little war lords. As to the German people, mere subjects, they have eighteen or twenty centuries of monarchical atavism in their blood.”

Democratic Mark And The Austrian Aristocracy

Mark Twain was essentially a democrat, and the nobles he met in Berlin and other parts of Germany never cured him of that fine habit. But in Vienna he grew less exclusive and in the end actually liked to mix with high aristocrats. “The Prussian noble,” he once explained at the Metropole, “walks and acts as if he had swallowed the stick they used to beat him with when a youngster--I stole the simile somewhere, but never mind--however, the Vienna brand of aristocrat is different. Maybe Austrian nobles are just as stuck-up on account of their ancestry, but they have the good sense not to let their pride be seen. They all treat me cordially, talk agreeably and seem to possess at least a stock of superficial information. The Princess Pauline Metternich, in particular, is a bully old girl. If she were to write her memoirs, the world would gain a book as bright as Mme. de Sévigné’s Letters. For one thing I would like to have seen her husband’s face when he learned that she made him sign his own death warrant.

“Prince Metternich, as Austrian ambassador in Paris, used to sign any and every paper his secretaries put before him, as he was much too indolent to read them. To cure him of this habit, Pauline one fine day laid a document on his desk, ordering that he, the Prince, be taken out and shot at sunrise. Metternich promptly put his name to it without reading a line. Next morning at five, several male friends of His Highness rang the bell at the Palace and demanded to be taken up to the bedroom. They wore Austrian uniforms and made an awful racket with their swords. Metternich stormed from his bed to see what the row was and then and there the death warrant was read to him. He fainted. Indeed they had a big time snatching him from the brink of the grave, for he was near frightened to death.

“Some jocular wife, eh?” chuckled Mark.

Phil Sheridan’S Friend

“Jenny Stubel,” mused Mark over the “Berliner Tageblatt” at the Cafe Bauer, “Jenny Stu--, there is a yarn about that girl in the back of my head, but what it is I cannot for the life of me make out.”

“What has she done now?” I queried. “Marriage or divorce, set a theatre afire, or made away with one of those stupid archdukes flourishing in Vienna?”

“Half-correct,” said Twain, “an archduke abducted Jenny. But how did you come so near guessing it?”

“I was Jenny’s manager in the early eighties when she and her sister Lori headed the Vienna operetta company. In fact, I introduced her to Grover Cleveland--”

“And Phil Sheridan?” demanded Twain.

“Sheridan, Joaquin Miller, Henry Watterson and the rest.”

“We’ll get this story pat first,” said Mark, shoving the paper over to me. “Chances are I have it upside down. Let me have the facts and keep the trimmings for some other day.”

The “facts” told the now well-nigh forgotten story that (some time in October, 1891) the archduke John Salvator of Austria had renounced his title and dignities, had assumed the name of John Orth, bought a four-masted schooner and, as her captain, went sailing the Atlantic and Pacific in company with Jenny Stubel, the operetta star.

“‘Tall, yellow-haired, lots of quicksilver in her system,’ that’s how Sheridan sized up Jenny. Right, you say? Well, then, her archduke wasn’t so very foolish, after all, particularly as she was a sweet singer, a nimble dancer and all that. Did you say you introduced her to Grover Cleveland?”

“Sure, at one of the public afternoon receptions, when everybody went to shake hands with the President.”

“General Sheridan was quite taken with Jenny,” continued Twain. “He told me he went to the show night after night and didn’t care how much he applauded her young beauty and fascinating voice. Yes, Phil was really smitten with Jenny. And now the admired of the most famous General of Horse defies the world to become an acknowledged royal mistress, and her sprig of royalty the black sheep of a crowned family by no means lily-white at that. She reminds me of old Field Marshal Prince de Ligne, making love to a very young girl and succeeding, or nearly succeeding, before he had time to reflect.

“‘A million,’ cried the Field Marshal, ‘if I was a lieutenant now.’”

“Elizabeth Was A He,” Said Mark

“Mark my word, Elizabeth was a _he_,” said Clemens, when I was starting for London the end of June, 1894, leaving the Clemenses at the Normandie, Paris, “and when you have a little time in England, I wish you would look up all that pesky question for me.”

“Not in Westminster Abbey?” I cried in alarm.

“Now, don’t _you_ try to be gay,” said Mark. “It’s bad enough if _I_ got that reputation when I want to be taken seriously. I know they haven’t got through ascertaining for the ’teenth time whether Charles I really lost his head when his overbearing noddle dropped into the basket on the scaffold opposite the Horse-Guards--you showed me the spot yourself. I don’t want any ghoulish work done. Just go to the British Museum and every other library and nose up everything appertaining to Queen Elizabeth’s manly character. You get the authorities (for a consideration, of course) and I’ll do the rest. Then you go down Surrey-way and find a place or castle or summer house called Overcourt, or something. That’s where Elizabeth lived in her teens, and metamorphosed into a boy.”

“But the editor will never allow you to write on such a subject. Better let me do it.”

“Not on your life,” said Mark. “It’s _my_ discovery, and I’m paying you for the work you do, just as the New York ‘World’ and the ‘Sun’ do. When you come down to hard tacks you will find that there are no questionable proceedings whatever, just an exchange of babies, as in the old-time operas, Troubadour and the rest. The Editor will have no kick coming.”

“The Editor,” of course, was Mrs. Clemens, who as a rule censored Mark’s manuscript--“tooth-combed it,” as he called it, cutting out such gems as “the affairs of the Cat who had a family in every Port.”

Mark told me that when he got through with “Joan of Arc” he would tackle “this here Elizabeth proposition”--“a person full of placid egotism and obsessed with self-importance,” he called her. “If I do Elizabeth half as well as I intend to do ‘Joan’ and did ‘The Prince and Pauper,’ I will have three serious books to my credit, and after that I will be damned--‘thrice damned,’ Elizabeth would have said--if I allow anybody to take me for a mere funmaker.”

He gave me some more instructions, talking at random mostly, and paid me in advance for the work I was to do. Twenty-four hours later I landed at Victoria Station, London, for, having business in Antwerp, I had travelled via Holland.

* * * * *

A foreign correspondent (that was my trade then) is shifted merrily from one place to another; so it happened that I went back to France after a fortnight in England, or even sooner. The Clemenses were packing, and I had Mark all to myself for an hour or so.

“What made you first doubt the Virgin Queen’s sex?” I asked.

“Never mind--her gorgeous swearing maybe. What did you find out in Surrey?”

I duly reported that I had gone to Overcourt with a friend, had explored the Queen Elizabeth chambers, the woods and countryside, and had interviewed a lot of old and some young gossips, with this result:

Elizabeth, I was told, came to Overcourt when a child of four or five, and a young person supposed to be Elizabeth--that is, the daughter of Ann Boleyn and Henry the Eighth--left there some ten years later. When the Princess was seven or eight, King Henry, who was attending Parliament, had promised to come and see his little girl two weeks hence (Overcourt is within easy riding distance of London). But even as they were preparing to give Hal--(“Ought to be Hell,” interpolated Mark)--a rousing reception; to feed the brute in particular, Elizabeth was suddenly attacked by malignant fever and died. There was only one “in the know,” her Grace’s governess--I gave her name to Mark, but have quite forgotten it. I remember, though, that she remained in the royal service for some forty years afterwards, in fact, that she and “Elizabeth” never separated while both lived.

“I can imagine how that poor woman felt,” commented Mark--“went through all the horrors of having her hair bobbed behind, and her neck shaved--what else was there in store for her but a beheading party if Hal found his daughter dead? And when, in your mind’s eye, you see the executioner try the edge of his axe on his thumb nail, life’s delicatessen--considerations for truth, politics, and common everyday decency--lose their appeal. The axe-man was coming and that governess didn’t want to be the chicken.”

“That’s what the gossips told me, and they had it from their great-great-great-grandmothers, a blessed heritage.”

“Go on,” said Mark.

“Well, that governess knew that her life depended upon finding a substitute for Elizabeth, and the substitute couldn’t materialize quickly enough. Briefly, it did materialize in the person of the late Princess’ boy playmate--here are his name and affiliations, as Overcourt neighborhood has it.”

“Fine,” said Mark, “the rest I know or can imagine. She dressed up that kid in Elizabeth’s petticoats and togs and frightened the life out of him not to betray her or himself with the King or any one else.”

“Quite right,” mused Mark, “for the eighth Henry was an ogre--the very unborn children of England knew it. Besides, reading up the official history of Elizabeth, I find that Hal hadn’t seen his daughter for three or four years previous to his visit in Overcourt. The deception, then, worked easily enough. _I_ could have done it at a pinch.”

* * * * *

Mark next went into the life history of the great Queen, or supposed Queen. “She was a male character all over--a thousand acts of hers prove it,” he insisted. “Now tell me what were the conspicuous Tudor traits--”

“But you said she wasn’t a Tudor,” I interrupted.

“Precisely, but she had to copy the Tudors as our stage impersonators imitate Bernhardt and Henry Dixie. Now what were those Tudor traits: remorselessness, cunning, lying till the cows come home, murder, robbery, despoliation! All of them Elizabeth, or the man who impersonated the Queen, practiced to the dotlet on the _i_. Think of the letters she wrote to Francis Drake, the inventor of fried potatoes, and to the second Philip of Spain. Wasn’t that a man’s game? Could woman ever get up anything so misleading and contraband?

“And the way she fooled her English, Spanish, Austrian, German and French admirers, setting each against the other, never neglecting to threaten Spain’s flank, and, at the last, throwing them the head of Mary of Scots as a gage of battle--regular male strumpet’s chicanery, I tell you.”

From a drawer Mark pulled a highly decorated volume, and turned the leaves quickly. “Elizabeth’s official lovers,” he explained. “Lord Seymour, second husband of her stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr. Catherine, I gather, was in the secret; otherwise she wouldn’t have allowed Seymour to carry on with ‘Elizabeth’ as he did. And he had about a yard of whiskers on his face at that. There was Leicester, this big chap here with the goatee. She had him beheaded, not because he knew anything against her, or about her real sex, but because he had the _reputation_ of knowing things. The Virgin Queen made her alleged lover a head shorter, just to show that she didn’t care what she did. Henry and Francis, the French Valois brothers, Dukes of something or other, were likewise large, sinister looking fellows. These, too, she used, man fashion, like boobs, and as no other crowned harridan ever used a lover. Think of Catharine (of Russia) and of Josephine and Marie Louise--to be loved by those ladies was real fun, a treat.” Mark lowered his voice to add: “I read somewhere that Catharine allowed the brothers Orloff no less than fifty thousand roubles pajama money--fifty thousand! One can buy a powerful lot of nighties for that much money, even at the Louvre, across the way.”

“There’s the Britannica,” continued Mark, jumping up. He found a paragraph under the caption of “Elizabeth” that tickled him immensely. “Read this, and call me a liar if you dare.”

The paragraph states that there was “some physical defect” in Elizabeth’s make-up, that she was “masculine in mind and temperament,” likewise, that no man ever lost his head over her as they did over Mary of Scots.

“’Nuff said on the score of love-making and lying,” concluded Mark. “’Nuff for the present, I mean; but here is another thing. We all know there is only one Hetty Green, that there never was another. Yet this here Elizabeth, so called--_i. e._, the man who impersonated her--was as clever a financier as John D. Rockefeller. As John D. gobbled up all the oil in creation, or out of it, so Elizabeth, so called, lapped up all the gold, minted and otherwise. Up to the sixties and seventies (of the sixteenth century) Spain had an absolute monopoly of the yellow and white metals, you know. When the person called Elizabeth died, all the gold of the world was in English hands, and, besides, England dominated all the ocean trade routes, where formerly the Spanish flag had been unchallenged.”

“As circumstantial evidence, can’t be beat,” I suggested timidly, “but--”

“You remind me of the cat that bolted a whole box of Seidlitz powders and then had no more judgment than to lie under the open hydrant,” exploded Mark. “Why don’t you ask me to trot out Elizabeth in an Andy Carnegie Highland costume, kilts and all? There will be missing links, plenty of them, after all these years, that goes without saying, but it’s a great story, nevertheless. Needs a hunk of brain, though, to puzzle it out to its logical conclusion.”

Soon after this conversation, the Clemenses went to Italy, and for some little time I expected to hear from Mark further on the Elizabeth legend. But the yarn seems to have slipped his memory, and as I found him engrossed in matters of the moment, I didn’t try to revive his interest in one so remote.

But I have often wondered whether, or not, his many unpublished writings show that he brought “his hunk of brains” to work on unsexing Elizabeth.

Mark--The Sleight-Of-Hand Man

Minister William Walter Phelps gave a dinner to the Clemenses in Frankfort, when Mark Twain and Livy were staying at a nearby watering place, but Mrs. Clemens was not well enough to attend--or, as Mark whispered to Mr. Phelps--was unwilling to go, being afraid that he might disgrace the family by some practical joke. So Mark had it all his own way and enjoyed his freedom hugely, keeping all in a roar.

Finally, Dr. Von Something-or-Other tried to get in a word edgewise and abruptly asked Mark what he thought of the European equilibrium.

(Mark said afterwards: “Knowing my political incompetence, the Doctor probably tried to inveigle me into making an ass of myself.”)

The Herr Von’s question having been delivered in no sotto voce style, everybody pricked up ears to hear Mark’s answer.

“I can’t explain in a few words,” he said, “but I’ll demonstrate.” And turning to Mr. Phelps: “Hand me the Doctor’s plate, please.”

The Doctor looked up “disgusted,” because he had only just commenced to eat and was “as hungry as a dog.” Plate in hand, Mark stepped to a space between the window and the table and asked the Doctor to join him, bringing his knife. “Now,” he said, “I will throw the plate up to the ceiling and you will catch it, on the end of your knife, but don’t you spill anything. After catching it, you will please keep it spinning upon the end of your steel for five minutes, balancing it so as not to lose a drop of sauce, a chop, or fried murphy. And when you have performed all these stunts without mishap, you will have gained a correct idea of what I think of the balance of European power.”

Mark And The Imperial Mistress

At Vienna, in the late nineties, Clemens one fine day intoxicated himself with the idea that there would be millions in writing a play with Kathi Schratt, Emperor Francis Joseph’s acknowledged mistress, as heroine. He had in mind a collaborator among native playwrights, and the piece was to be translated into all living tongues. Mark actually started on the thing, adding to his knowledge of German as he went along. Matters having gone so far, I persuaded him to go and see Frau Schratt for local color.

“Bully,” he said. “But you must come along. I would never trust myself alone with a royal mistress, not I.”

Well, we went, saw, and--wondered at Francis Joseph’s taste. In speech and manner, though, the Schratt was a fine old girl. Showed us a big houseful of presents, all gifts from his Majesty, and elaborately so marked.

We had duly admired the silver bed, the silver folding stool and the ditto cabinet, likewise other chamber paraphernalia of white metal, when the Schratt said: “There is one thing more the like of which you haven’t in America.”

“You don’t say so!” ejaculated Mark, in blasphemous German.

The Schratt pushed a button, a wall panel shot sideways, and the handsomest silver-gilt bathtub ever came waltzing in, or rather roller-skated in.

In our homeward bound fiacre, Mark remained silent for fully ten minutes; then he delivered himself sadly but firmly:

“No, it’s all off with that mellerdrammer. For if I let Schratt ride down to the footlights in that golden tub, people will want to see the Empress in it, too; next they will holler for Kaiser Bill, Sarah Bernhardt, Loie Fuller, and William Jennings Bryan. It won’t work--people are such hogs!”

And the drama was never proceeded with.

Mark On Lynch Law

They were talking lynch law in Professor Krafft-Ebing’s library in Vienna--some horrible nightmare that had come in the latest cable--and as a matter of course Clemens was asked his opinion as an American and observer of human nature.

“Lynch law means mob-lawlessness, doesn’t it?” he drawled. “Well, what does it argue? To my mind it argues that men in a crowd do not act as they would as individuals. In a crowd they don’t think for themselves, but become impregnated by the contagious sentiment uppermost in the minds of all who happen to be en masse. While in Paris last, the family and I toured all the places of horror, made odious during the White Terror--we followed pretty closely the scent of the ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ Michelet, Dumas, and others. I was particularly interested in the ‘Official Gazette’ of the guillotine, ‘The Moniteur,’ and my girls helped me read and digest many tell-tale pages yellow with age and tattered by usage. Among other interesting items, I found recorded that on a certain date the Nobles had voted to forego their feudal privileges.

“Now, their previous failure to renounce these same rights had been one of the prime causes of the Revolution. Yet when they acquiesced, they were put to the knife just the same, for mob-law ruled then. Another case in the ‘Moniteur’: I read of a deputy named Monge, the same whom Napoleon in his Saint Helena talks pronounced a most lovable character, so kind-hearted that he would never eat any fowl if he had to kill it first. Yet in the Convention, in the midst of the mob of his fellows, this same Monge vociferated for unlimited bloodshed, for ‘war to the knife.’ He had caught the contagion and, intoxicated with bloodthirstiness, acted the madman.

“‘I love my children,’ he cried, ‘but if the Convention decrees war on the enemies of the Republic, I will give my two daughters to the first two of our countrymen wounded in battle.’ Would he have said that seated quietly at his fireside? Certainly not. It was the mob that was talking through his mouth.”

The Terror

Mark returned to the subject on another occasion. He said:

“You know I have always been a great admirer of Dickens, and his ‘Tale of Two Cities’ I read at least every two years. Dickens witnessed my first holding hands with Livy when I took her to one of his lectures in New York. Now that I have finished ‘The Two Cities’ for the ’steenth time, I have come to this conclusion:

“Terror is an efficacious agent only when it doesn’t last. In the long run there is more terror in threats than in execution, for when you get used to terror your emotions get dulled. The incarnation of the White Terror, Robespierre, wasn’t awe-inspiring at all to the general public. Mention of his name did not send the children to bed, or make them crawl under the blankets. On the days when he made his great speeches, the galleries and the aisles of the Convention Hall were thronged with women, old and young--that does not look as if Robespierre had been an object of general fear or abomination--does it?”

Recollections Of King Charles And Grant

“Now show me the place where that ancestor of mine had King Charlie beheaded.”

We had been sitting on some chairs which the great Napoleon had used in Saint Helena--the heaviest sort of mahogany, “and not a rat bite to be seen,” Mark pointed out, as we went exploring the Army Museum at Whitehall, London.

Agreeable to his demand, I took Mark by the arm and led him to a window looking out on the “Horse-Guards,” the famous old barracks, gazed at so much by American visitors.

“Outside of this window,” I explained, “the Commonwealth built a platform, and on this platform stood the block where Charles lost his silly bean.”

“Served the traitor right,” said Mark, “but that reminds me of----”

He thought a while, then repeated:

“Why it reminds me of (let’s see, we are in the second story, are we not?)--the grandstand in front of the Palmer House, Chicago, for that was also entered from the windows of the second story. I am speaking of the Chicago of 1879, welcoming General Grant after his triumphal journey around the world. What a sight the Windy City was, and what a grand sight he looked when he stepped upon the platform to review the Army of the Tennessee.”

“Yes,” I interrupted, “and I saw you on that very platform shake hands with Grant.”

But Mark Twain could not be tempted to go into his personal history when General Grant was being discussed.

“Did you ever see a city so magnificently and so patriotically bedecked?” he cried. “There was not a monument, palace, rookery, saloon or telegraph pole that was not gay with streamers and bunting, pictures, garlands, colored lanterns and placards of all sorts.”

“Yes there was,” said one of our friends.

Mark stretched out his hand and grabbed the speaker’s arm.

“No nonsense now.”

“I am as serious as you, and I say that the German Consul, with offices opposite the Court House, did not have a flag out on the day of Grant’s entry and reception.”

“Are you sure?” demanded Clemens.

“As sure as you are standing there. And I am proud to-day that I wrote up the story in the Chicago ‘Times’ and that Guy Magee, the city editor, headed it: ‘The German Son of a B----.’

“Well done. I could not have written a more accurate head myself.”

Mark Missed Gallows-Land

“Every time I went to Italy,” Mark Twain once said, “I felt like crossing over into Monaco.”

“To gamble?”

“Guess again, when billiards and solitaire are the only games I indulge in. Indeed, I am so ignorant, I would not know a roulette from another baby circus. I was and I am still crazy to go to Monaco to see a gallows, or, preferably, a hundred of them.” Mark eyed his audience curiously. After an impressive pause, he continued:

“Once upon a time, in the days of Louis XV and Mme. du Barry, there was a Prince of Monaco who was blessed with a very beautiful wife. Well, evil-minded people said of this prince that he smelled like a dead horse, and Madame the Princess simply could not endure defunct ‘gee-gee.’ So she decided that she had a perfect right to look for a soul-mate elsewhere, and be sure she got them by the score. Of course not in Monaco, as it is such a small country. She went to France, and particularly to Paris, for her amusements. And every time the Prince learned of a new lover worshipping at his wife’s shrine, he set up a gallows and hung the favored one in effigy with frightful ceremonies.

“The country, as remarked, being rather Lilliputian, his Highness had to go to the frontiers for his gallows planting, and as Madame the Princess was of a very changeable nature the principality, in the course of several years, became enclosed in a regular fence of gallows trees. When Paris heard of this, it laughed boisterously at the Prince’s strange humor and Madame the Princess’s latest lover swore that he would go to Monaco, rob the gallows of their manikins and carry them off to the future Champs Elysées for a marionette show.

“He tried--with a band of companions, but got pinched and was hanged by the neck in person, and not in effigy. Now, I wondered whether these gallows are still standing,” concluded Mark, “and if not, I wanted to find their habitat anyhow--make a map of gallows-land, so to speak.”

Too bad Mark missed writing a book on so promising a subject.

Think Of Her Sorrows

He read to several friends in Vienna what he had written about the murdered Empress Elizabeth. “I know it is full of exaggeration,” he admitted. “I did gown her with virtues she never thought of possessing and I have denied all her frailties. As I learn now, she was just an ordinary woman, and her surpassing vanity was the only extraordinary thing about her. But think how much she suffered and think of the man she was married to. Re-read, too, that story about the murdered Rudolph. When Count Something approached her to break the news, she ran to him wringing her hands and cried: ‘My Rudy is dead. Oh, my Rudy!’ What told this Niobe among royal women that her son had been destroyed--killed in a low debauch? When I reflect how she maintained her self-respect in a life of constant disappointment and tragedy, I think I did well making her out a noble soul.”

Breaking The News Gently

Returning to Vienna from a flying trip to Budapest, Mark was full of “a yarn that would illustrate like a circus and run for five years, every Sunday a page.” He said he heard the story at the archduke Joseph’s country place, the same Joseph who, towards the end of the war, tried to make himself King of Hungary and failed, but the probabilities are that the story was Mark’s own, with Magyar trimmings. It ran as follows:

A great landowner, after a business trip of several months, returned to Budapest, and was met at the station by his carriage and pair that was to take him to his estate in the country.

“Everything well at home?” he asked the coachman.

“Excellently well,” replied the driver, cracking his whip.

After a while the Baron ventured another question:

“Why didn’t you bring my dogs along?” he asked.

“Dogs are sick, your Excellency.”

“My dogs sick? How did that happen?”

“Ate too much fried horse.”

“Fried horse? Where did they get that?”

“Stable burned down.”

“My stable burned down, cattle and all? Awful! What about the castle?”

“Oh, the castle is all right.”

The Baron thought it over for the space of a mile, then said:

“You are sure the castle was not hurt by the fire?”

“Sure, only the two wings burned down.”

“But the family is safe?”

“Yes, the family is all right.”

When the horses entered upon their tenth mile, the Baron resumed his examination:

“Children all well?”

“All well and happy, except János and Maritzka, who were burned.”

“Burned, oh Lord! And the Baroness, my wife?”

“Oh, she is better off than any of us. God has her in His holy keeping. She was burned to death. Yes, indeed, she died with her mother and in her arms.”

“This is what I call breaking the news gently,” said Mark.

Dukes And Unborn Car Horses

I told Mark Twain of the Princes and Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, “in meeting assembled” at London, who had protested against the expulsion of their kinsman, Dom Pedro, from the throne of Brazil.

“Just as efficacious as if the car horses that remain unbred since the arrival of the trolley sued the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, or the Third Avenue electric line, for murder,” snapped Mark.

“Pa Used To Be A Terrible Man”

With Mark’s daughter Susie, I was walking in the Berlin Thiergarten one afternoon when we encountered a very rough specimen of the genus tramp.

“Look at him,” said Susie. “You know, Pa, too, was an awful man before Mamma took him in hand and married him.” And with added seriousness, she continued: “He used to swear and swear, and then swear again, and the only thing that he didn’t do that was bad was to let cards and liquor alone--some kinds of liquor.”

It is too bad that I forget Mark’s comment on the above when I told him.

Mark On The Berlin Cops

You know, of course, that Mark Twain at one time had a flat in Berlin and kept it going for a whole month. “I am tired of hotels,” he said, “and hereafter I am going to take my comfort in my apartment as Dr. Johnson took his in his inn.” After that he entertained the habitués of the embassy for a week or longer with stories of the beauties of home life, until we voted “Koernerstrasse Nr. 7 the jewel.”

But one fine evening I found a note from him at the Hotel de Rome, asking me to call at the Royal at 8:00. I met him in the lobby with several sympathizing friends, and he said:

“It’s all up with Koernerstrasse; too much police.”

“Did you have burglars, or the bailiffs, in?” was asked.

“Neither; just social calls from policemen--ten per day. The cops weren’t exactly unkind, but they annoyed me.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Asked questions.”

“Income queries?”

“Yes, of course, but I don’t mind lying about little things like that. On the contrary, making a clean breast of it, I confessed that I get a whole cent a word for every word I do, even for little words like ‘I’ or ‘Manafraidofhismotherinlaw.’ Did they believe me? Not they! They thought I was exaggerating.”

“What did they ask about next?”

“Craved information about Eliza and Marie. ‘Don’t know any such females,’ I growled severely.

“‘Mr. Clemens,’ bawled the policeman, ‘if you are trying to hoodwink the Royal Police of Berlin, there will be trouble. Confess now. You have an Eliza and a Marie and a Gretchen in this house.’

“‘Oh, you mean the maids,’ said I. ‘I don’t know anything about them. My Missus hires and bosses them. Ask the girls whether I am stringing you.’

“That evidently made no hit with the policeman, for he vociferated respectfully but sternly:

“‘It is your duty (according to paragraph this and that of the Civil Code) as head of the household (according to paragraph so and so of the Civil Code) to be informed whether or not these girls have been properly vaccinated.’

“His ‘head of the household’ made me laugh, but I managed to object: ‘How should I know?’

“‘Don’t you see them around with bare arms?’

“‘Maybe I do, but I never paid enough attention to say offhand whether they wear cuticle or fur.’

“‘And you didn’t notice vaccination marks on their arms?’

“‘Never. I can swear to that.’

“‘Then you _do_ know, that they are not vaccinated on their arms,’ said the policeman ever so insinuatingly. I’ll bet he read up the story of the serpent in Paradise.

“‘On the contrary, I _don’t_ know whether they are vaccinated on their arms or not,’ I answered truthfully. ‘Maybe they had themselves vaccinated _under_ their arms. I haven’t looked.’

“‘Some women,’ said the policeman, ‘are so vain that they get themselves vaccinated on their legs.’

“‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but I have looked neither under their arms nor under their petticoats--I presume they have legs. However, I don’t know anything about them, for sure. And this being their day out, if you _must_ investigate, they will be back about ten o’clock, and, returning, you may look for yourself, if the law says so.’”

Mark indulged in one of his impressive pauses, then continued:

“That policeman did return and told the girls that he was authorized by me to look for their vaccination marks wherever located. Of course, it caused a row all around, the girls protesting that I was no gentleman. So, to end it all, I paid the rent for the whole year, eleven months’ rent, and left the flat.”

The Sausage Room

James R. Osgood, the former Boston publisher, later a member of the new firm of Osgood, McIlvain & Company in London, for whom I was doing the translation of Field Marshal Count Moltke’s works, had given me a set of Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth for Christmas, and when I went to see Mark Twain at the Royal in Berlin during his illness, I took the two small volumes along and offered to loan them to the sick man. He was as pleased as a three-year-old with a new toy.

“I always wanted to read these Memoirs,” he said. “She was a corker, that sister of the Great Frederick. I most heartily admire her. You know Howells did this translation while U. S. Consul in Italy and they say it is the best ever.” He dived into volume one and I left, to return next day. When he heard me talk in the vestibule to Mrs. Clemens, he hollered out:

“This way to the sausage room, where Her Royal Highness’ slave keeps.”

I went in.

“I am reading this book for the second time,” he said, “and it actually makes me forget that I am sick. I forget even coughing my soul out.”

Mrs. Clemens seemed to be annoyed about the “sausage,” but Clemens said that Heine had had the same sort of chamber when ill so long, and as the poet was quite contented “with his French Soucisson,” he must be with his “Frankfurter.” As a matter of fact, for its length, the room was extremely narrow.

“If it had legs, I would call it a _dachshund_,” suggested Mark, when Livy kept on grumbling.

I asked whether he had many visitors and he said:

“Yes, a few every day. As many as I can stand. But the women have all deserted me. There is a bunch of American girls in Berlin just now, but none find their way to the Royal. I am without a “_Mouche_” (French for fly)--I mean the human kind--the same as enlivened Heine’s dying days. What a girl that _Mouche_ was! I think she inspired some of his finest shorter poems. She was a real comfort to him, too. Maybe she was after advertising and liked to make Mathilda jealous. But, what of it? She made Heine laugh and Heine’s songs will make the world happier as long as it stands.”

While talking, he was groping in the air after flies and at last caught one. He held it in the hollow of his hand listening to its buzzing for a while, then asked me to take it in my own hand, never hurt it, open the window and let it fly out.

“I learned that from Tolstoy,” he said. “Tolstoy, you know, used to catch lots of mice in his house, but never killed them or gave them to the cat. He carried them out to the forest and there set them free. Why should a human being kill little animals? Because a tiger may want to eat me--that’s no reason why I should turn tiger, is it?”

He returned to the subject of the Margravine Wilhelmina.

“They thought I went to Bayreuth to hear Wagner,” he said. “Nothing of the kind. I like his Wedding March hugely and very little else he has done. But, while Livy and the kids went to pieces over Tristan und Isolde and The Nibelungen, I visited the grave of the Margravine and looked at the temples and grottoes and houses she built, the statues and fountains she set up, the beauty she lavished on the landscape! Ah, Wilhelmina would have been the woman for me--for a week or two, I mean, even as I would like to have been the Great Frederick’s dinner companion for a little while.”

Mark’S Glimpse Of Schopenhauer

As Mark’s German was getting worse instead of better, and as his French was nowhere, he asked me to accompany him on his contemplated exploration of the Berlin Royal Library. I told the librarian about our great friend, about the interest he took in German affairs, and, in particular, I recalled that he had met the Kaiser at dinner. Of course the librarian turned himself inside out to be agreeable to both of us.

After showing us around a good deal, he gave us an alcove to work in, saying: “In this set of drawers you will find some most private papers of the royal family that are perhaps of public interest, but the public, please remember, must learn nothing of them. They are only to be seen by people of discretion, who value historical knowledge for history’s sake.”

Most of the books, pamphlets and manuscripts we found dated from the times of Frederick the Great and of course they were in French, since Frederick neither read nor wrote German intelligently. There was in particular a volume of verse by Voltaire addressed to Frederick, with original illustrations by some French artist, but the poetry was too grossly indecent to have interest for persons outside of a psychopathic ward.

I translated some of the verses to Mark, who said: “Too much is enough. I would blush to remember any of these stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna.”

I copied one verse for him, and as he put it in his pocket he said:

“Livy is so busy mispronouncing German these days she can’t even attempt to get at this.”

After some rummaging, Mark pulled out a manuscript that seemed to be of more recent date.

“German or Chinese laundry tickets?” he asked.

“It’s German,” I said, glancing at it.

There were about ten pages of copy, neatly written and headed “Mein Briefkasten” (My letterbox). On the line below was the title: “Tetragamy by Schopenhauer.”

Mark was at once interested.

“Schopenhauer, the arch-misogynist,” he mused, “let me see, physically he might have been the grandfather of queer Strindberg of the land where the matches come from. Ever read any of his books or dramas?” he asked, and before I could deny the implication, he was off talking again: “I have studied Strindberg’s womankind, hard-faced, sullen, cold-blooded, cheeky, grasping, vindictive, hell-raising, unvirtuous, unkind vixens, all of them--a dead give-away on the author’s part, for a writer who sees no good in women confesses that he was found out by the sex he wars on and that the female of the species pronounced him n. g. before he had time to out-Ibsen the Norwegian. If I ever turn over a new leaf and beat Livy, bet your life I will have naught but honeyed words and sweet metaphor for the ladies. This fellow Strindberg’s women are all compounds of vile ingredients--hideous hags with or without angel-faces--wife-beater Strindberg whipping dead mares. Well, to return to Schopenhauer (to me as incomprehensible as mutton) what’s this?” (pointing to the word Tetragamy), “Hebrew or merely Yiddish?”

“Literally it means marrying a fourth wife.” I examined the first page of the manuscript. “Seems to deal with conditions due to monogamy.”

“Good,” exclaimed Mark, “I have always wanted to reform monogamy, when my wife isn’t looking. Now let’s have the medicine straight.”

“But,” I said, “I can’t do this long MS. justice here. The librarian will come in presently and you heard what he told us.”

“Well,” said Mark, “you sit down and copy the German while I cover you with my broad back. Should the librarian intrude, I will knock on the floor.”

Accordingly, I copied those several pages, and afterwards made the translation Mark wanted.

But for several days Mark didn’t show up at his usual haunts, and even Mr. Phelps, the American Minister in Berlin, didn’t know what had become of him. The telephone was but sparingly used then in the legation offices. However, on the third or fourth day, Mr. Phelps learned that Mark was down with bronchitis at his hotel, the Royal, and that when he wasn’t sneezing or coughing, _ennui_ plagued him sadly.

“Well,” I said, “I have got something to liven him up,” and showed Mr. Phelps the manuscript. He advised me to send it at once to the Royal, but when I called on Mark Twain a week later and inquired _sotto voce_ whether he had received the manuscript, he said:

“Of course not. The wife got it and you know she won’t let me read anything but tracts. I suppose she burnt our MS.”

“Well,” I said, “I have got a carbon and I will let you have that by and by.”

“Not while I’m at home,” he said, “for now she is on the scent, she will watch out. She is dreadfully afraid that some one may corrupt me.”

Mark remained indoors for over a month, the thing was forgotten, and later, when he asked for the manuscript, I couldn’t find it. Other interests came up and Schopenhauer was shelved, though at the time we made the find, Mark speculated on getting a book out of it by amplifying it with other writings of the philosopher, particularly his “Fragments of Philosophy” and his “Pandectes et Spicilegia”; the latter are still in manuscript or, at least, were in manuscript in the early nineties.

If Mark were alive to-day, how happy he would be at the discovery I made quite recently in an old chest of drawers. I had seen a movie play, showing the extravagant amounts of money one can earn by selling old manuscripts--including the rejection slips--and I started cleaning up an old piece of furniture wanted for less ideal purposes. And there I found the long lost Schopenhauer MS. According to the notes, this manuscript belonged to a parcel of handwritten essays willed by the philosopher to the Royal Library at Berlin and dealing with themes and matters that Schopenhauer hoped to work out and improve upon by and by. But death overtook him before he could exploit the problem in hand. Here follows the MS. Mark was not allowed to see:

_Schopenhauer’s Tetragamy._

_The Philosopher’s Attempt to reform social conditions due to Monogamy._

Neither woman’s frailty nor man’s egoism should be held responsible for those frequent miscarriages of domestic happiness encountered in married life. Nature itself is to blame. If the state of monogamy, as some of the philosophers will have it, is the natural one, then nature disarranged its own scheme beforehand by making woman’s sexual life twenty or thirty or even forty years shorter than man’s.

At the present time males and females in the civilized world are about equal in number. This, too, is taken for proof that nature favored monogamy. It is a fact, on the other hand, observable in practical life as well as by medical investigation, that a woman is well able physically to be the wife of two men at the same time.

There are no healthier and more beautiful women, of their kind, than the Tedas of Asia who marry besides their chief-husband all his brothers, no matter how many he has got.

We do not go so far as to advocate polyandry. Polyandry is a condition based on a low state of civilization. But basing our proposition on physical grounds, we venture to assert that tetragamy, reorganized and protected by law, would be a married state doing away with most of the evils of monogamy from the man’s standpoint, while contributing to woman’s happiness.

We propose the introduction of a new form of marriage on the following lines. Instead of one man marrying one woman for better or worse, we propose that two men, friends of course, marry one woman, always a young and healthy person, with this understanding:

After the woman has reached a certain age, the two friends shall be at liberty to marry another young woman, but without divorcing or abandoning the first.

The second woman shall provide the men, if she lives, with a capable and loving mate for the rest of their lives.

Such a state of things would result in the happiness of two women, both would be taken care of for life and there would be no rivalry either.

As far as the men are concerned, tetragamy would do away with a passion leading to so many fatalities: jealousy.

Now let us look at tetragamy, as defined, from an economic standpoint.

At the present time, the average young couple enters into the marriage state when the man’s capacity as a provider is unequal to the demands of the average pleasure-loving woman. His meagre resources do not allow him to supply her with the luxuries she craves, nor has he as much money for himself as before marriage. It would be a waste of words to point out that these conditions are responsible for much unhappiness among married folks.

Take a case of poverty. Many a man who can hardly support himself tries to support a wife, and not only a wife, but children, numbers of them! What is the result? The woman, driven by want, for the love of her children, becomes a breadwinner on her own account. The time she ought to devote to her little ones, born or unborn, she spends in the factory, at the washboard or sewing machine.

Is that natural? If nature favored such a state of affairs, nature would be illogical, and who dare assert so monstrous a thing?

In the state of tetragamy, man has to bear but one-half of the household’s expenses. This gives him a chance to save money and to do something for his education, while the children, being supported by two men, have better clothes, better food, more love, and a better home.

Tetragamy would make for morality, because it would make it easier for men to get married. It would make for morality because woman, having two husbands, would not be longing for an affinity. And when old, she would not suffer from the thought, or from the actual knowledge, that her husband betrays her.

Things are different to-day. The man who marries young sees the fire of love extinguished in the woman at his side after a certain number of years.

As to the average woman, in the state of monogamy, she is only too often compelled to marry a man physically inferior to her. If she escapes that fate, then, in the course of time, she must needs come to the conclusion that she is too old for her husband.

But I am not unaware that there are serious objections.

As to the children, their identity would be determined by their looks.

As to possible differences--they will not be greater than in marriage as it is to-day. If people are inclined to fight, they will do so under any conditions, good, bad or indifferent. For my own part I am inclined to think that there will be less fighting, since jealousy will be eliminated beforehand.

What about financial affairs? There should be no communism, of course. Each man could contribute his share and the woman should be allowed free disposal of her savings.

Of course, the state must take the first woman under its protection. She can never be abandoned and can be divorced for cause only.

Under the sway of monogamy duties and nature are forever in conflict. Woman is tempted when young, is abandoned morally or physically or both when old.

If this be natural, then nature should be reformed and tetragamy substituted for monogamy.

“Murderer” Blucher In Oxford

“Oxford, though you might not think so, has a traffic cop, the same as Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue,” said Mark in the Savoy Lounge across the teacups after the excitement over his triumph in the British University metropolis had cooled down a bit. “He is a smart guy--actually remembers Holmes’ visit and asked me about the old man. He spoke of him as ‘Ome’s, Sweet Ome’s.’ When you come to think of it, it’s a good name, after all.

“Among other interesting things, not connected with the University, was a public house sign I lit upon at a corner not far from our inn. It showed a great warrior on a fierce charger. ‘General Blucher’ was written across the bottom. It gave me quite a start when I learned that on this spot, in 1816 or 1817, Blucher hollered for a drink and got it when on his way to the University.”

“What did he want with the University?” I queried.

“He was crowned a doctor there after Waterloo.

“I tell you, that took me down a peg, or rather a whole row of pegs. Blucher a doctor like myself! I knew him as a foul-mouthed, cruel, pestiferous, and thieving scoundrel--occasionally lucky in the field. But now I wanted to know more about him and I have haunted the British Museum for additional facts. What do you think I learned? Blucher, who was dirty and slouchy by nature, dressed up on the eve of battle:--best tunic, fancy sword, gilt lace, feathered hat and what-not! And he had himself bathed, rouged and powdered, manicured and curry-combed.

“‘I feel like a girl going to her first ball,’ he used to say.

“And people like that, who delight in murder and rapine, receive honorary degrees!”

Mark’S Human Side

Susan, Jean, and Clara Clemens, papa Mark, and myself were having lots of fun at the famous Salamonski Circus in Berlin--Mark and I laughing with the children when there was nothing else to interest us. There was a girl of 16 or 17 doing a stunt on a horse. Mark said: “The poor child looks as if she had never had a square meal in her life--isn’t that professional smile of hers too sad for words?” While she was doing a salto mortale, a clown ran in and dived between the horse’s legs. The horse got frightened and threw the rider. Of course, the children thought this part of the program, and laughed heartily. But the girl didn’t attempt to get up, and when the riding master tried to raise her, she cried and moaned, and one of her legs hung down lifeless, while the blood spurted through her white tights.

“Keep still, children,” said Mark. “Don’t you see the poor girl is hurt?”

A stretcher came and carried off the moaning girl and the performance proceeded as if nothing had happened. But though the children begged hard, Mark would not stay.

“Another time, not now,” he insisted.

Just then a gypsy-looking, elderly woman came running from behind the scenes, looking about wildly. When her eye located the clown, she rushed up to him and hit him a terrible blow in the face. “You have ruined my girl. She will never be able to ride again,” she cried.

“Served him right,” said Mark. “I do hope the manager gets a clout on the jaw, too. For he really is the responsible guy. The clown has to get laughs, the girl has to risk her limbs, so that the manager may coin money. What a world this is, what a world! And you and I, too! I never thought of kicking myself for laughing when that poor girl broke her leg--nor did you, I bet.”

An Australian Surprise

At the time when Mark was living quietly at Ledworth Square, London, writing “Around the World,” we met a party of Australians at the Metropole one afternoon. It was after poor Susie’s death, and the heartbroken father hadn’t made anyone laugh for months. But those “Aussies kind of woke me up,” he admitted. “Jolly guys, out there at the Antipodes,” he said after the first round; “too bad I didn’t know that when I struck Sydney. As I prepared to step upon the platform there, I wondered, with some fear and trepidation, whether your people would take kindly to my brand of humor. If they refused to be tickled by my first lecture--God have mercy upon my creditors! Of course I had my story pat. Still, as I climbed those steps, I debated in my mind whether or not I had better substitute such or such a yarn for the opening lines planned. I had half decided to risk a change, when I faced the audience and--the pleasantest, the most overwhelming surprise of my life! I met a sea, a whole Atlantic, of guffawing heads, of swaying bodies and shoulders. There wasn’t a titter or a snicker; there wasn’t any smirking or grinning; all eyes were in flood with genuine laughter; men, women, and children were crowing and chuckling aloud, were shouting and hurraying, everybody was convulsed--really I must have looked the white kangaroo for which I was named. The Sydney audience laughing at me before I opened my mouth clinched my success at the Antipodes.”

Mark In France And Italy

From Paris Mark Twain usually returned disgruntled. His stories did not go in France, and there was that “Dreyfus affair” that made him sick of the “frog-eaters forever and a day.” Nor was Mark appreciated in Italy.

“The Dagoes,” he used to say, “like their humor colored with politics, of which I know nothing, or flavored with risqué stories, which my wife won’t let me write--there you are. As to France--one critical Madame gave me to understand that I am ‘lacking in the stupendous task of interpreting the great tableaux of real American life.’ See? When a wet blanket of that kind is clapped on to you, what is the use of further efforts? I am a dead one, according to Madame, and Mark Twain is too humane to whip a dead horse. I will tell you what is really the matter with France,” concluded Twain. “Every Frenchman who can read and write has in his closet a frock coat embroidered with the lilies (or whatever flower it may be) of the _Académie Française_--hoping against hope that he may be elected to the Institute like Molière or Zola. Hence Monsieur is very critical and pronounces everything he doesn’t understand ‘bosh!’ A joke in Chicago, you know, is a riddle in Paris, and, as one Frenchman put it, ‘I get guffaws out of people by thumping them on the ribs.’ I would never dare thump a Frenchman, of course--I might bust him.”

Why Mark Wouldn’T Like To Die Abroad

Mark Twain cracked so many jokes, I thought I would entertain him a bit myself, and told him about an aunt of mine who, while dying, heard that she was going to lie in state in the green room.

“Not in the green room,” said auntie. “I always hated that wall paper. Besides, it’s unhealthy.”

Twain admitted that was good fun, and regretted not having thought of the green paper himself.

“She must have been a fine old girl,” he said, “to stand up for her rights even ‘in extremis,’ as the doctors call it.”

“By the way,” he continued, “every time I paddle the Atlantic I say to myself, ‘Mark, old boy, don’t die on this trip.’ For, of course, folks have a foolish notion that one’s bones must rest at home. Accordingly, if I died as United States consul in the Kingdom of Sheba--if there be such a place--Washington would have to send a warship to fetch my bones back to America. Again, if I died a plain citizen in London, I would be shipped back in an ordinary liner. But think of it. Before shipping my body, it would have to go into an undertaker’s vault, and undertakers’ cellars are dark and mildewed, and nasty smelling. By George, I wouldn’t like to be in a cellar for a week or two. And afterwards they would place the casket in the hold of the ship with other boxes, and the rats come gnawing about, and perhaps the ocean looks in too and gives you a swim. No, it isn’t pleasant to die abroad. I want to die at home, in bed and in comfort.”

At another time Mark returned to the theme, saying:

“Remember my story about the body in the morgue? They couldn’t make out whether the person was dead or merely shamming death, and so they put a bell-rope in the man’s hand, and later, when the man awoke from his deathlike sleep and rang the bell, the watchers got so frightened they ran away, and, it being freezing cold, the man died a real death. When they next looked upon him, he was as dead as a doornail. No, as I said before, I want to die at home, without any bell-ropes, or undertakers’ cellars, or rats, or bilge water.”

The Left Hand Didn’T Know

“I saw your protégé in Paris--he is getting along finely with his painting,” I told Mark, meeting him in the Strand, London.

“I do not know what you mean by protégé,” he said evasively, “but I am glad to hear that the boy is progressing. Do you know,” he added quickly, “I hold with that famous English letter-writer, whose name I forget, that an artist has brush and pencil and that the public will reward him as it sees fit.”

Of course, Mark didn’t “hold” anything of the sort. He had then supported that bright American boy in Paris for three years, giving him the best of teachers and advancing his chances in every way possible, but he resented my touching upon the subject. I suppose he would have cut me dead the next time we met, if I had reminded him of the colored boy whom he was seeing through college in the States.

American Humorists

They were talking about humorists in Mr. Jackson’s office. Jackson was the first secretary of legation, blessed with a very beautiful wife and money. After a lot of talk, Twain was asked for his opinion.

“Well,” he said, “the greatest American humorist I know of is Mr. Fox of the ‘Police Gazette’--the fellow who put full evening dress on sluggers. John L. Sullivan and some of the hard-boiled boys he licked were, of course, familiar to the American eye in trunks and undershirts. Reflect on the giant mind that conceived the original idea of making them look like Kyrle Bellew or Augustin Daly. Fox with that picture beat us Knights of the Quill easily.”

Telepathy Or Suggestion

In the nineties Mark had asked me to translate his yarn on telepathy for the “Berlin Boersen Courier.” The story had caught on, and the editor kept bothering for more of that sort. Mark had promised again and again, but nothing came of it. When I asked him for the tenth or fifteenth time, he said, “Pshaw, telepathy is out of date. I saw some mental suggestion done at Professor Glossen’s in Zurich that knocked spots out of telepathy.” He asked the rest of the company to listen, and continued:

“That there be no room for deception of any kind, the professor asked me to go to any drug store in town and buy a bottle of distilled water. We scraped the label off, swathed the bottle in linen, and then buried it carefully in a box--a sort of fireless cooker arrangement. This was done before the students began to arrive. When the lecture room was good and full, the Professor addressed the boys to the effect that he was on the track of a new chemical, but that his discovery was still far from complete. The chemical, he continued, had a peculiar odor, heretofore not classified, and this morning he was anxious to study the rapidity with which that odor would diffuse itself through the air. Hence he asked the students to give the utmost attention to what he was doing. Each student was to raise his hand the moment he perceived the strange odor.

“The Professor unburied and opened the bottle, turning his head away so as not to be overcome by the odor, while I watched the proceedings by a stop-watch. The boys were all ears--nose, I mean. After fifteen seconds, most of the students in the first row were holding up a hand. In 40 seconds the odor, which did not exist, had traveled to the rear benches, and when we counted noses, seventy-five percent of the students acknowledged perception of the odor and some even went so far as to be nauseated by it.”

Trying To Be Serious Didn’T Work

At Brown’s, in London, somebody spoke in glowing terms of Raymond’s portrayal of Colonel Sellers.

“You needn’t praise him for _my_ sake,” said Mark. “I did not write the part for an actor like him at all. I wrote it for Edwin Booth. That is, I had Edwin Booth in mind when I did the play. But Raymond was the superior money-maker. He had the masses with him--and I was pressed for funds.

“As a matter of fact, my Colonel Sellers is a portrait study--a take-off on a fine old Southern gentleman, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, whom I knew in life. He had some funny traits about him, but these never counted with me. It was the pathos in his life that got me. And the pathos, relieved by a few funny things, I intended to put upon the stage. Raymond caricatured the part, and I often felt like taking it away from him.”

Assorted Beauties

Of the Vienna women Mark Twain used to say that they were so “cussed pretty a man walking out with his wife feels relieved when he meets a plain one.”

He was reminded of his visit to the Berlin court and was asked what he thought of the ladies he met there.

“They were so loaded down with tiaras, necklaces, and sets of jewelry, my eyes were too dazzled to get a good view of their faces. I am sure, though, that most of the old ones had enormous backs. And that recalls a story that I heard at an embassy here, which I must not name. The ambassadors were talking of the beauty of the women of their own country, and they all looked with pity on the Korean consular representative, wondering what he would say, but he was a spunky chap, and when his turn came, blurted out: ‘Well, gentlemen, as to the fair sex, there isn’t much to boast of in my country, but I _will_ admit that the ladies of our court at home are no less ill-favored than the women of the Berlin Schloss, and they are dirtier, too.’ That postscript,” said Mark, “was the funniest thing I heard in a long time. He said it in a right hearty and well-meaning way, too. He evidently meant it and was proud of it.”

Mark’S Children Knew Him

I congratulated Mark Twain on the fact that he had been mistaken for the great Mommsen, and, throwing out his chest, he said:

“I feel indeed flattered because somebody thought that I have the whole Roman world, with Poppæa and Nero and Augustus and all the rest, under my hat, yet, when I come to think of it, there is some difference between us two. _My_ children know their papa, and I know Susan, Clara, and Jean. But think what happened to Mommsen the other day. He was proceeding to a bus from his residence, when an unmannerly wind carried off his hat. A boy, playing in the street, picked it up and brought it to the great man. (By the way, never run after your own hat--others will be delighted to do it. Why spoil their fun?)

“‘Thank you,’ said Mommsen. ‘I never could have recovered the hat myself.’ He looked the boy over carefully, and added:

“‘And a nice little boy. Do you live in the neighborhood? Whose little boy are you?’

“‘Why,’ said the kid, ‘mamma says I am Professor Mommsen’s little boy, but I never see him. He is always among the Romans, writing in a book.’

“‘Bless your heart, little man,’ said Mommsen. ‘To-night I will surely be home early; tell your mamma, and ask her to introduce you and the other children properly.’”

Mark, Dogs, Dagoes, And Cats

Mark never tired telling of the Italian literary shark who unsuccessfully tried to blackmail him out of twenty francs.

“He had a peculiar grievance, that Dago,” said Mark. “He vocalized to the effect that he had done me the honor to call four times at my villa and that, just as often, he came near losing the seat of his pants by the actions of my degraded dogs, who drove him off. Hence, he calculated that I owed him at least five francs per visit, on account of his trouble and the anxiety he suffered. But as I kept no dogs, neither degraded nor otherwise, my dogs couldn’t have worried the man. And he wasn’t on my visiting list anyhow.”

“Somewhere,” continued Mark, “I put on record that I know the business end of a horse very well, but I never bothered enough about dogs to make sure of their anatomy. Pussy is the animal for me. You remember my adventures in Koernerstrasse No. 7, Berlin. The women took that apartment in Slumland over my head, and lured me to approve of their choice by having two purring cats on the hearth, when I first saw the place. I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”

The Tragedy Of Genius

On October 13, 1891, Mark Twain and I went together to the Berlin University to see the great Virchow lionized and almost deified by his fellow professors and by the students. Mark was much impressed and promised to give Virchow a good send-off in his correspondence. And on the way home he waxed almost sentimental, saying: “Virchow is seventy years old. In a little while he will either be dead or that great intellect of his will begin to deteriorate, and what a pity that would be!

“There was Emerson, who valued impressions and ideas above everything--in his way as great a man as Virchow and certainly a great benefactor of his countrymen. But Holmes told me that in the late seventies of his long life, facts counted no longer with Emerson, for his memory was gone. At Longfellow’s funeral, which preceded his own by a few months only, Emerson walked up to the coffin twice, probably forgetting the second time that he had already gazed upon his late friend’s face. When he had taken this last farewell, he came back to his seat and said to the person nearest to him:

“‘That dead man was a sweet and beautiful soul, but I have completely forgotten his name.’

“For myself,” concluded Twain, “I have forgotten many a thing, but I will never forget that little speech of poor old Emerson. _Sic transit gloria mundi_--such is the way of the world, a free translation, I know, but highly applicable.”

Kilties And The Lassie

“I heard a good one on a young Scotchman, a fellow who was always trying to show off in kilties. By the way, Andy Carnegie told me about him. This young Scot, with some other chaps, went on a tramp of the lakes of Scotland, and young Douglas had a good time showing off his fine calves--talked about them and made comparisons with other well-known legs, of actresses, bishops, dancers, etc. (In England all bishops wear knickers, you know.)

“At night the boys put up at a rather dilapidated inn, neither clean nor promising other creature comforts. But the girl who waited on them, maid or scullion, was a dandy--blonde and blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked and sturdy of arm and leg.

“As she flitted in and out of the room, bringing whiskey and water, cheese, bread and dried fish--that was all the bill of fare afforded--the travelers’ eyes followed her, and when she left the room there was many a knowing wink. Douglas got jealous of the attention bestowed on Miriam.

“‘What is there to go daft over?’ he demanded peevishly.

“‘Well,’ said they in chorus, ‘for one thing, she has better legs than you, Douglas.’

“Douglas hotly denied the imputation. There was an argument, and it was finally agreed that the two be measured. If Douglas lost, he must pay for the night’s reckoning.

“Accordingly, Douglas was put to the tape, and the girl also. Miriam had a few more inches of calf, but the Scotchman was undaunted. ‘Have you ever seen finer thighs than mine?’ he boasted.

“The lad who had been doing the measuring got flustered, but the girl laughed:

“‘Don’t be afeerd, Laddie; the higher you go the bigger they grow. I’ll be the winner.’

“And she was,” said Mark, with a chuckle of evident approval.

A Wise Provision Of Providence

From a window at the Hotel de Rome, Mark and friends were “reviewing” the ceremonial entry of the King of Italy in Berlin.

“Fine horse-flesh,” Mark kept saying, “and the gee-gees look better fed and happier than all that bedizened and beribboned royalty.”

“What’s that string of riders following the ‘four-poster’” (Mark’s description of a state coach), “tied to the twelve horses? They seem to sport every conceivable uniform, Horse, Foot, and Artillery!”

“Those are the German kings and kinglets,” it was explained.

“Let’s count them,” said Mark.

They counted some twenty crowned heads, “young, old, and mouse-colored,” said our friend, as he retired from the window and attacked the coffee and cake. He sat musing for a while, but when somebody suggested “billiards,” he became alert as usual.

“I have been thinking,” he said--“thinking of wise Providence. Just fancy that Providence had run the Equator through Europe, instead of through the Pacific, or wherever it is now. If the Equator happened to be located in the Old World, each of the kings we have seen, and more to be heard from, would be itching and grabbing for it, pouring out their subjects’ blood like water (saving their own, of course) to get hold of the blamed thing. I would make them _sit_ on it. Hot dogs.”

The Awful German Language

In the Berlin of 1891, street-car conductors gave you a ticket for every mile traveled, and you were expected to keep all these tickets or slips of paper in apple-pie order to show to an inspector who might, or might not, come around. Mark regularly threw his on the floor, and dropped cigar ashes on them. Accordingly, he had to pay double fare every little while, and was abused into the bargain.

One afternoon, going to the Legation, we got into an old, rather narrow bus, and opposite Mark sat a woman with an enormous bosom.

“What do you bet she takes No. 52. corsets?” he whispered. “She grew that as a shelf for her bus tickets,” he continued. “If I had a ‘chester’ like that, I could save money.”

After a pause, he turned suddenly on me:

“What is bust in German?”

“Busen,” I translated.

“Male, female, or neuter?”

“Male--der Busen.”

He began slapping his knees with both hands, waggled his head from one side to the other, and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. But he never said another word on that trip.

Two months later the lecture, “The Awful German Tongue,” was delivered. But at the embassy we knew it almost by heart before he came out with it, for he was forever talking genitive case, declinations, definite and indefinite articles, and male, female, or neuter.

Artist Or Photographer

Mr. Clemens had met Lenbach, the eminent German painter, in Vienna, and when, a year or two afterwards, I ran across Mark in Munich, he proposed that we call at Lenbach’s studio. So to Akademie Strasse we went, and duly admired Lenbach’s collections. “Mostly painted kaisers, kings, and kinglets, also one man, W. K. Vanderbilt,” was Mark’s estimate. I saw Lenbach eye Clemens with business in his heart. Mark saw it too. “Wonder if he intends to throw me on the linen, I mean the canvas,” he whispered, while Lenbach was busy in another part of the shop.

“It would increase his popularity immensely,” I sotto voce’ed back.

Lenbach returned--with a camera, and as Mark looked puzzled, Lenbach explained: “I always get every possible angle I can of the persons I want to paint. Now, if you will just stand still, Mr. Clemens, for a little while, I will be ever so much obliged.”

And Lenbach made the rounds of Clemens, who had taken off his overcoat, more than once, photographing every important bit of anatomy, back, sides, front, arms, legs, ear, full face, back of head, cheeks, hands, eyes, etc.

“They told me in Vienna that Lenbach was an artist,” commented Mark when we gained the sidewalk. “As you saw, he is merely a photographer. Glad I never went to pieces over his art with a capital A.”

Whether the painting was ever undertaken by Lenbach I don’t know, but it would be immensely interesting to get those plates from the “photographer’s” studio.

Mark Interviewed The Barber About Harry Thaw

During his last visit to London, Mark called me up one morning and said: “My arm aches and I can’t do it myself, so for God’s sake, take me to a barber who can scrape one’s face without taking half the hide off. I am getting mighty tired of being flayed alive in this here burg.”

Accordingly we drove down to the Cecil in the Strand.

“I understand you are the man who treats a delicate skin like an American beauty rose,” said Mark to the barber.

“I will treat yours, Mr. Clemens, as if it were a butterfly. For I have read what you have said about Italian barbers,” was answered. And the things that happened to Mark’s face, head, hands and feet while in the chair would fill a column of “The Times” to enumerate. He remained two hours in the chair, and was not allowed to pay a red penny for the accommodation.

Later, at a well-known grillroom, we saw the massage artist alone at a table, and seated ourselves at the same board. The barber talked about other American celebrities and notorieties he had treated and mentioned Thaw.

“Oh, you shaved Harry--tell me about it,” said Mark.

When the barber had finished, Mark insisted, looking fiercely at me: “Not a word of this in New York, or there will be another dozen Thaw trials.”

As Harry Thaw is now disposed of, temporarily, at least, it won’t do any harm to print Mark’s interview with the barber.

It seems that Harry and Evelyn occupied a suite at the Cecil before they made that notorious exhibition of themselves in New York. Harry was an early riser and Evelyn was not, and when the barber called at eight, as ordered, Evelyn either had to be put out of bed forcibly by Harry or remained under the covers (for a time at least).

“And could you do your barbering and currycombing with that pretty thing within arm’s length?” asked Mark.

“I had to,” said the barber. “I was paid for it; besides, there was a terrible horsewhip on the bed and a revolver in an open drawer.

“Harry insisted upon smoking while I wielded the razor, and I had the greatest difficulty in the world not to cut him. He also insisted upon quarreling with Evelyn or lauding her beauty while my knife played around his mouth. This sort of thing went on for a week or more, when one fine morning I saw that Harry had rigged up a shooting stand in the hall of the apartment.

“‘Close the door,’ he cried, ‘and pull the curtains across. I don’t want the servants to hear.’ Then he began firing at the target. Evelyn had been asleep, and hearing shots, jumped out of bed and began crying: ‘My God!’ and ‘Mamma;’ likewise promised ‘never to do it again.’”

“Never to do _what_ again?” asked Mark.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“But you were right next to her; why didn’t you ask her?” insisted Mark.

“But it was her private business,” said the barber.

“Sure it was, but that was so much more reason for worming it out of her. You are a good barber, but a h---- of a reporter.”

“Of course, the floor attendants came trooping to Thaw’s door and the house telephone and speaking tubes emitted a volley of questions.

“Harry was prepared to give an impertinent though truthful answer. But Evelyn took the phone in hand and swore that it was an accident, due to her carelessness--Harry had nothing to do with it, and she was going to apologize to the management. When things had quieted down, Thaw told me on the d. q. that he would transfer his revolver practice to a certain shooting gallery. ‘I want to be an A No. 1 shot when I return to New York,’ he said. ‘There is a fellow who has deeply wronged my girl and I am going to have it out with him.’”

His Portrait--A Mirror

“People wonder why I spend so much time abroad,” said Mark Twain at a little luncheon party in Vienna, where young wine, fresh from the vat, circulated freely. “One of the reasons is that I have no doubles in foreign countries, while in the States I had notice served on me twice a month on the average that I look exactly like Mr. Cobbler Smith or Mr. Bricklayer Brown. I was told they had the very same warts, in the very same places, where I sport them--accuracy or imagination, which? The day before I left New York I got a letter of that sort and, having booked passage and nothing to fear, I made bold to answer it.

“‘My dear Sir,’ I wrote. ‘I was so much impressed by the resemblance that I bear your face, feet, hands, mustache, eyelids, ears, hair, eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, and other things, that I had the portrait of yourself you so kindly enclosed framed, and hereafter I shall use it in place of a mirror when I shave.’”

“Wife never saw that letter,” added Mark. “She was packing.”

Mark, Bismarck, Lincoln, And Darwin

I had been to see Bismarck to help boom Bryan for the Presidency, when that gentleman happened to get defeated for the Senate.

“And is old Bismarck still reading those trashy French novels?” inquired Mark.

“Much worse,” I said.

“Started Paul de Kock over again?”

“Worse still. He is reading Mark Twain now.”

“You don’t say. Since when the reform?”

“Since his daughter-in-law, Herbert’s wife, the little Countess Hoyos, gave him a set for Christmas.”

“Hoyos, Hoyos. I met some people of that name in Italy.”

“Your fair patroness hails from Trieste, or neighborhood.”

“How do you know that Bismarck not only owns, but reads, my books?” demanded Mark.

“Because he asked me whether there are still steamer loads of Yankees going picnicking in Palestine with Mark Twain for a bear-leader. The old Prince told me he read ‘Innocents Abroad’ twice, and memorized the best things in it to relate to his grandchildren.”

“Quite a compliment--I _do_ wish Bismarck hadn’t been such a rascal--in politics, I mean--for in private life he was quite a gentleman, I understand. And it is to laugh how, relying on that, de Blowitz worked the greatest of scoops during the Berlin Congress. Namely, about that world-moving affair the ‘London Times’ for weeks could get no more or better news than, mayhap, the Brighton Enterprise. Finally de Blowitz, the Thunderer’s international representative, lit upon a fourth-rate secretary in the German foreign office, who had an exceedingly broad appetite and a correspondingly narrow pocketbook. De Blowitz offered to pay for the secretary’s luncheons, provided the young gentleman would exchange hats with him daily, the Berliner’s chapeau concealing certain notes about goings on at the foreign office under the hat band. Agreed! By this ruse de Blowitz gathered the whole Berlin treaty piecemeal and was able to cable it from Brussels to London even before that famous document was read in the Congress.”

Mark continued: “If Bismarck had been the ordinary small-minded statesman, he would have got on to de Blowitz’s game before it was half finished, but being a gentleman, he saw nothing out of the way in the association of ‘The Times’ correspondent with one of his secretaries.”

Mark was genuinely proud of Bismarck’s partiality for his books, even if it came late in the day.

“Do you know,” he once said, “that I gave Charles Darwin the strength to write some of his most famous and epoch-making volumes? How? I am told that, when the great scientist was utterly fagged out with study, investigation, and with the manifold experiments he was carrying on, he would read my ‘Innocents’ or ‘Tom Sawyer’ or, maybe a Harper Magazine story, for a half hour or an hour. Then he would go to work again and later was ready for bed. Only when this here Mark Twain had lulled his nerves into proper condition, Darwin wooed sleep, I am told, but I can’t vouch for the truth of this story.”

On another occasion Mark said: “I was born too late to help ease Lincoln’s hours of worry. Ward Hill Lamon, whom we met in Berlin, told me more than once that Lincoln would have been a constant reader of my ‘literature’ if he had lived long enough to enjoy my books, and none knew Lincoln better than Lamon.

“And when my girls admonish me to behave in company, it always recalls the stories Lamon told me about old Abe’s awkwardness.

“When Abe and he were riding circuit in Illinois, they carried their office in their hats, and Abe contracted the habit of pulling off his hat from the back so as not to spill any papers. That was all right on the circuit, but in the White House it looked undignified. So Mrs. Lincoln asked Lamon, a most courtly gentleman, to remonstrate with the President and teach him to take off his hat ‘decently.’ ‘Decently’ was the word she used, said Lamon. He continued:

“‘I did my best during a night’s smoker, Mr. Seward helping me, and the President proved a good enough scholar for any high-school of courtesy. Eight or ten times he took off his hat properly, without a reminder of any sort. Then, at the good-night, I tried him again. ‘Let’s do it in the right courtly fashion,’ I said, doffing my chapeau like the Count of Monte Cristo.

“‘Here goes,’ said the President, reached his right hand back, and pulled off his stovepipe in the old Illinois circuit style.”

“You see,” concluded Mark, “it was no use trying to make a courtier of Lincoln. The same here.”

Mark At The Stock Exchange, Vienna

A day or two after I sent Clemens my translation of Field Marshal Count Moltke’s Letters, he called at my hotel in the forenoon and proposed that we walk to the stock exchange. The stock exchange, as usual, was swarming with gentlemen of the Jewish persuasion, and Mark asked me to pay particular attention to them.

“They are the smartest of the lot here,” he insisted, “and so is a Jewish peddler smarter than a Christian house-owner--I mean the average. I say it again; the Jews are the greatest people let loose.

“According to Moltke’s essay in the Letters you sent me, the Jews ate up Poland. Very well, the storks eat up frogs. Do we blame the storks?”

Mark And The Prussian Lieutenant

Mark liked to be taken around to real German places, and one day I escorted him to a Weinstube Unter den Linden, which had quite a reputation for liquid and other refreshments. The room we entered was full of lunchers; we sat down at a small side table that afforded a good look around. About fifteen feet ahead of us was a pier glass on the wall between two windows, and in front of it a table where an old man with his frau were eating the national dish with sausage trimmings. The old folks were enjoying themselves heartily, and, as Mark put it, “they ate so you can hear them a mile off, like Chicago millionaires.”

Presently, a young lieutenant strode in, sword trailing, spurs jingling.

“Look at that,” said Mark. “All the stupidity and maliciousness of his ancestors, male and female, for two hundred years back, is mirrored in his face.”

The junior war lord stalked up the centre aisle, gave his cap to a bowing waiter, and stood up in front of the pier glass. Then he pulled a comb out of one pocket and a brush out of another, and began “currycombing himself,” as Mark expressed it. Parting his hair all the way down to the neck, he brushed it sideways both ends--over the old people’s sauerkraut and sausages. Mark kicked at me under the table and called me names for not going and knocking the fellow down.

“Don’t you see, he’s peppering those people’s dinner with his dandruff,” he said. “Be a sport and go and kick him well, young fellow.”

But I knew better. The lieutenant would have spitted me on the end of his sword before I could say Jack Robinson.

Gradually Mark’s wrath melted away and he saw only the funny side of the affair. When the lieutenant had taken his seat at the table, he put one knee over the other and ordered his pea soup on the rough--that is, with the husks intact.

“Husks are filling, you know,” said Mark, “or perhaps his stomach is full of chickens. Chicks like husks; that lieutenant is human, after all.”

I thought we had seen enough and I encouraged him to go home.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I am going to see this circus to the end. Presently that old woman will vomit when one of the lieutenant’s bristles tickles her funny bone, and then she will spew all over his boots and pants. I am waiting for that.”

Mark Studies The Costermonger Language

“Funny that we never took to asses in New York and other parts of the States,” said Mark one afternoon as we were passing through Soho, London. He was watching the little costermonger carts traveling to and fro with considerable speed, taking into account the petty draft animals, the heavy loads and the boy or girl perched on top.

“The donkeys seem well fed,” mused Clemens a block or two further on, “but I don’t like a whip in the driver’s hand. Hear that,” he cried indignantly, “the rude way that corduroy-panted chap is talking to his meek donkey. Let’s listen some more. It’s a scream.”

After the cart had driven away, Clemens said: “The patter of the costermonger, when you come to think of it, is really a language within the English language, and one might do worse than give it printed tongue--_i. e._, raise it above the merely occasional use British writers accord it. I want to look into that costermongery,” he continued. “See if you can’t find, hire or steal some coster chap worth listening to, some one who knows the patter with all the trimmings.” And at his door he added: “Get an ‘Arriet,’ for the ‘Arry’s’ are too tough.”

A week or two later Herbert Beerbohm Tree found us such a patter artist among the employees of Her Majesty’s Theatre--a scrub lady--and here follow some of the stories she told us, corrected and amended by Mark, who cut out coster words not generally understood.

Mark And The Costermongers

That _Beautiful_ Funeral

Two Girls Meeting at the Corner of a Street.

“Hullo, I didn’t know you had moved up this way again. Who are you in black for?”

“Stepfather. Thank Gowd! he _was_ a reg’lar log on the fambly’s leg. Kept a-ebbing and a-flowing and _wouldn’t_ die. But you know when we moved to ’Ampsted, that settled him. Those flu winds it was as took ’im off.

“We ’ad a postmortem and everything on ’im, and when they opened ’im you know they found he had two ulsters in his inside and there was ’aricot veins in his legs too. But it was the influential winds that took ’im off, real.

“Of course Mother ’ad ’im insured in all sorts of places. So, poor man, he real paid for all this beautiful mourning we are having on him. We all dress alike in this beautiful black.

“On the funeral day we had all our cousins up from up-country and we had such a _beautiful_ funeral and such a swell party atter. We had a hotch-bone of beef and blanmanges and jellies and cakes and tarts, and by Gowd! we did enjoy ourselves.

“Good-by, Maisie, see you another day, for my missus isn’t a disagreeable old cat like most of ’em. That’s why I ’ave this bit of talk with you. But I means to better myself soon as I can.”

Ada’s Beast of a Man

“Well, m’am, I feels all over alike. That beast of a ’usband of my pretty pet of a Ada he wouldn’t let her have a van to move in when she had all that sweep of furniture that he bought for her at the market for five pounds ($25) and her chest of drawsers besides. Real, I don’t feel as if I could eat a bit, I don’t.

“She had to get a barrow, Ada had, and a wheel came hoff and the pretty pet had to hold it up with the long broom while the man was a-pushing of it. But I will say, she has improved her rooms in moving.

“But it didn’t look at all like a man of _his_ standing, the governor of a coal cart. And you can imagine what the neighbors said, seeing the moving on the barrow and my pretty pet holding of it up.

“But I _must_ say she got blinds, they are those Verinkers (Venetians) you ’eard of. Sure he is a beast, my pretty pet’s man. He wouldn’t even put up the indecent lights for her, and she had to pay a man tuppence to do it for her while she was still a-trembling from holding up the barrow and that after paying tuppence halfpenny for the indecent lights.”

Jealousy in Lowland

(Overheard near Billingsgate Market.)

“Hullo, how you gettin’ on and how’s your old man?”

“See ’ere, you remembers ’ow I looked atter ’im when he was that damn’ ill and all the nourishments I got ’im. Well ’e got that strong again but ’e wouldn’t go to work. So I says to ’im yesterday mornin’ w’en ’e was a-sittin’ over the fire smokin’ his dirty pipe, ‘Ain’t you _ever_ to go work no more?’

“What d’you think ’e says?

“‘Ere,’ he says, ‘I ’ave bin a-thinkin’. Where did you get all dese ’ere nourishments from while I was sick? I _do_ believe you had a boy. ’Ho is the man? I’ll knock ’is damn’ block off.’

“Now remember, maid, ’e never said a word while ’e was gettin’ the nourishment down ’is gut, the beast, but afterwards ’e says dis ’ere to me. ’Ere’s a beast for yer, girl.”

_Lady No. 2_--“’Ere ’e’s a-comin’ along the corner. Let’s scoot, maidie. ’E doesn’t look good-natured at all, at all, this mornin’.”

The Troubles of Liz

Liz, the maid-of-all-work, has overstayed her furlough, and is very emphatic, putting the blame on Kate.

“Oh, I won’t go out with that there Kate no more, m’am. That Kate do know a lot of fast chaps. She interdooced me to one and he kept a-cuddlin’ of me round the neck and near pushed my hat off, you see it’s all awry. And he kept a-pinching of me about and arsked if it was all my own figger. But he did say _Dear_ to me.”

Liz’s next place was with a butcher’s, but there they “were real rude” to her, and she left, of course. This is her report of what happened:

“‘Here, Liz,’ said one of the helpers to me, ‘there’s two kidneys for my tea. Take a care, you got two like that.’ Oh, I can’t stay in a place where they talk as fast as that, just as if I had kidneys like a cow.

“And the other chap comes and brings me a bit of liver to cook for _his_ tea, and he says: ‘Liz, you know you’ve got a liver just like that?’ I just ran upstairs and told the missus. And in the evening one brings me a pig’s head with a squint in his eye and he says, ‘Liz, this is what you do to the boys--give ’em the glad eye.’ No, I won’t stop, as true as there is Gowds in ’eaven.”

Her next place was with a benevolent old spinster. Liz left her service, saying: “I had no wages, and what do you think she did? Why, she has locked up the tarts. And the other day I was making myself a bit of toast and margarine and the old cat caught me at it and she said, ‘Isn’t dripping not good enough for you, Liz?’”

The French Madame

One night in his dressing-room, Sir Herbert Tree introduced us to another promising story-teller, namely, the French madame who looked after “the ladies of the chorus, who raise a shapely leg before us.” (That was a popular sing-song then and Mark heartily enjoyed it.) She told Clemens of a stroke of good luck that had befallen her and he declared himself tickled to death with her French-English, which, he said, was every bit as good as his own English-French. Tree kindly lent us “Basil,” his stenographer and “memory,” to jot down the yarn.

“Louisa, Be Brave”

At Madame Raymond’s house.

“Ah, Madame, how do you? Will you have a drink or are you too proud already?”

“_Mais non_, Madame, we will have ze leedle drink as usual. And how have you been getting on, Madame?”

“Ah, no at all well, I have been worried, _ma chère_, for my ’usband he did join ze Lib’ral Club.

“Ah, after I tell you my leedle experience, _mon Dieu!_ you won’t let Alphonse join ze damn Lib’ral Club.

“Listen. As M. Raymond stayed till 1, 3, 4th o’clock in the morning at the Lib’ral Club, I was told one or two or three leedle things about him, but of course I did not think or believe at ze time. But ze three time he did not come at ze 4th in the morning, I get up and dress myself and go arounds to ze Lib’ral Club and does bash bangs at zat door.

“And presently a head comes out of ze window upstairs and he says: ‘What you want down there at this hour of ze evening, Madame?’

“‘I want M. Raymond, my ’usband.’

“‘He is not ’ere, Madame. Ze Club always closes at eleven ze clock.’

“‘I thank you, Monsieur, sorry to trouble you.’ So I put zese leedle things together that I had been told and I jus’ go rounds ze corner and I listen down ze aria and hear sounds of reverie.

“A policeman he stood at ze corner. I says to ze policeman: ‘Here is two shillings, you go rounds ze corner and you sees notings. Ze madame here has decoys my ’usband to dance with the girls.’

“And ze policeman is off and sees notings.

“Then I goes close to ze door and bash bangs at ze door. And a Frenchwoman like myself comes up and she says, ‘What you want, Madame?’

“I said, ‘I want my ’usband, M. Raymond. Zat is all.’

“She says, ‘Your ’usband not ’ere, Madame.’

“I says, ‘Yes, I ’ear ’im downstairs.’

“Then quick she calls me lair and I gives her a bash bang down into ze passage. She cried and up comes ze madame’s ’usband.

“He says, ‘What you do to my wife, you bad madame?’

“I says, ‘She will not give me my ’usband.’

“He says, ‘You are a bad madame. I turn you out of my ’ouse. Your ’usband not ’ere.’

“Then just comes up M. Raymond.

“‘Ah,’ says I, ‘this is all I jus’ want. So you come along wiz me.’

“Ah, my dear, we _did_ ’ave a leedle words on ze road ’ome and M. Raymond says, ‘A pretty ting you done for yourself; you will be sermonized for knocking that madame down.’

“But I patted me on the chest and I said to me, ‘Louisa, be brave.’

“A day or two after dis, a sermon came from the South Western Police Court. Ah, _mon Dieu_, I was jus’ a leedle frightened, but I said to me: ‘Louisa, you have been ze brave woman and you mus’ be brave all ze time.’

“_Eh bien_, you remember ze _chapeau_ I bought in ze leedle Soho shop and also that pretty gown in ze Chapelle Blanche--_très chic_?

“_Eh bien_, I put on ze _chapeau_ and ze pretty dress and ze nice gloves that come to ze elbows, and I had a cab with four wheels and I did go to ze police court.

“Ah, _ma chère_, when I get to ze police court, dere was a very fine tall handsome Inspector and he jus’ hands me out of ze cab and I jus’ go into ze court and ze case was called.

“And ze judge he was dere and I bows to ze judge and ze judge bows to me. And ze people, _ma chère_, zey were _ze big cowards_. Dey did not turn up.

“So when I tells ze judge my leedle story, he does dismiss ze case.

“I goes outside and sees ze fine tall handsome Inspector. Ze Inspector, he says: ‘You ’ave got off very well to-day, but ze excitement! You mus’ come wiz me and ’ave a leedle someting.’

“Well, my dear, I did go and ze Inspector he give me the winner of a ’orse and I jus’ win forty pounds, _ma chère_.

“And ze people w’ere my ’usband was dancing came to me in ze evening and apologized, and he says: ‘I’m very sorr’, madame, we did not say your ’usband was zere. He did no ’arm. I bring you a leedle present. I am chef at ze ---- Hotel and ’ere is a big basin of drippin’ for you, Madame.’

“He was a very good chef, that monsieur, and so was the dripping.”

The Great Disappointment

This story was told by Clemens at the American Embassy, Vienna.[B]

“She was the littlest, the sweetest maiden of about ten I have ever seen, and she came dancing up to me with a smile and wink that was simply bewitching. I was going home to 27 Fifth Avenue after a tiresome dinner where I had to make a speech (_had_ to--God bless the organizer of the dinner, for I won’t), and I was as tired as two dogs and as grumpy as seven bears, when this vision suddenly burst upon me. I saw at once that the little one was as happy as a lark, and naturally I beamed on her, for I love children.

“As she was tripping along just as if I had been her grandpa--trusting me with little confidences and petting my arm, she prattled about the moon that would soon come up and the bogies and the bats and about the fright they gave her, and I said:

“‘Little maid, hadn’t you better go home? Your mother may be anxious about you.’

“‘Oh, no,’ she said; ‘mamma knows I am out and she is at the window watching. She knows that I am walking with you, for I wanted to a lot of times.’

“Well, I felt as proud as Pierpont Morgan on discovering a Fifteenth Century missal and buying it for five dollars. And in my mind I patted myself on the back, and said: ‘Mark, old boy, they _do_ love you, all of them.’ Really, I felt tickled all over, and I don’t know how many thousands of words at fifty cents ‘per’ that kid wheedled out of me by way of answers to her questions and by way of compliments. She was a princess kid, I tell you. When we arrived at No. 27, I insisted upon taking her back to her home and there formally saying good-by to her. Indeed I would have liked to kiss that little lady, but as her mother was at the window I didn’t dare. And that kid kept on talking. If her words had been buns, single handed she could have beaten Fleischman with all his hundreds of bakers. But what puzzled me was that she was forever talking about selling tickets and how nice it must be to take so much cash for tickets. I thought, of course, she was referring to tickets at church festivals and, to increase my credit with her, I said that I bought lots of them and that people took chances on my books and sometimes I took chances myself and got burdened with some to cart home.”

“‘Oh, you write books, too?’ she said.

“‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I am a sort of bookworm, and here is your home and now you must go in, for it is getting late and the bats and the bogies are coming. Good-night, little lady, and sleep well, and when you are a big girl and have a husband and a house and a motor car, then you can tell your friends that once you walked with Mark Twain----”

“‘Mark Train! I never heard of him.’

“As I looked at my adoring and adorable little friend her lip began to quiver. It quivered still more, her blue eyes filled--could not hold the tears--they dropped down on her face and on my flattered hand.

“‘Oh, sir,’ she sobbed, drawing away from me (I thought she was broken-hearted because she had to leave me)--‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you were Buffalo Bill.’”

Footnotes:

[B] Miss Lucy Cleveland, the author, heard Mr. Clemens tell the same story at a dinner party in New York.

Rheumatism And Prodding

Some of the biographers of Mark Twain have made a lot of his sufferings by rheumatism while in Berlin. I saw him almost daily, except when he was down with bronchitis, and I heard very few complaints from him _re_ rheumatism. Occasionally he said, “My damned arm has done some howling in the night.” But when out of bed, it never “howled” badly enough to prevent him from writing or holding a book. He was scribbling most of the time, when not talking or riding, or walking, and when I saw him in his “Mattress Mausoleum” (as he called his bed), he handled pipe, papers, knife and books freely. I honestly believe much of that rheumatism scare was put on. For Mark liked leisure above all things. When he did not feel like writing, he told Livy he “had it bad,” and escaped a scolding. “Livy” was an excellent wife to him, but she had the commercial spirit that Mark lacked--and God knows he needed prodding once in a while.

On Literary Friendships

Mark Twain always liked to talk about “La Mouche, Heine’s girl-friend-to-the-death.” One morning, at the British Museum, he made me hunt through dozens of books, French, German and Italian, for her real name: Camille Seldon.

“So she wasn’t German,” he said. “I thought so, for a German girl, by her innate heaviness, might have spoiled that nimbleness of language we admire in Heine. Goethe’s girls, as their portraits show, were all beefy things--no, not all, I except Gretchen--hence Goethe’s Olympian periods, his ponderous style. It’s wrong, I think, to credit Camille with mere physical influence on Heine. Her limpid French conversation, I take it, aided in imparting to his French verse that airy, fairy lightness which a foreigner rarely commands.”

Some one reminded Clemens that Camille also had been the friend of Taine.

“A lucky girl! The most poesy-saturated of poets and the Father of English literature! I call him the Father,” he added, “because he made so many people read serious books which without his advice and encouragement they would never have tackled.”

Bayard Taylor’S German

“No, I haven’t got an ounce of envy in me. I once tried hard to get envious, but happily my wife interfered. I had to forget about it and turn my mind into other, cleaner channels. That was on our first trip to Europe, in 1878. On the ship we met Bayard Taylor, the poet, bound for Berlin, as ambassador to Bismarck. That, I believe, states the case more correctly than the official ‘ambassador to the Court of Berlin.’

“Well, Bayard made me feel pretty cheap by his display of German. That fellow was forever talking, thinking and writing German. Compared with his, my own miserable German vocabulary was an ant-hill facing Chimborazo. And when I heard him recite whole acts of his metric translation of Faust, I wished myself in his shoes, for I certainly did envy the man his Teuton knowledge. However, when I told Livy about it, she warned me and made me promise to suppress the nasty habit. Well done, for Bayard Taylor died within five or six months, at the age of fifty-three.”

Genius In Extremis

When we were about to pass the French Embassy in Berlin one afternoon, Mark dragged me across the street, saying:

“See those horses? That Kaiser is in there, making love to the Ambassador’s wife. I don’t want to meet him as he comes out or when he is thrown out, as he ought to be.”

At that moment a very distinguished English-looking gentleman passed us in a cab, raising his hat to Mark.

“Do you know him?” asked Mark.

“I have seen him in Fleet Street, I believe, but I don’t know where to put him. As you know, my eyes don’t travel far these days.”

“Why,” said Mark, “this is ‘Labby’ (Labouchère) of London ‘Truth,’ the Baron-maker. I call him that because he actually put hundreds of barons into the world, if not into the peerage--namely, when he acted as Secretary of the British Embassy in Paris and had the issuing of passports in hand. Suppose John Smith and Mary Smith, British subjects, toddled in and asked for their papers. Labby would look them over carefully and if their persons and address lent itself to the scheme, would make out the paper for ‘Sir John’ and ‘Lady Mary.’ Of course the people stuck to the title, acquired under the government seal, for the rest of their lives. Indeed, most of the Labby-created nobles by and by gained popular recognition as the real thing--baronets and baronesses. On Labby’s part it was all fun--burlesque pure and simple. Himself a noble by birth, he thought the nobility a stupid and useless institution these days, and if the prime minister--a commoner--could make dukes and princes, why could not he, Labby, at least make Sirs and Ladies? But of course when the government got wise to it, Labby got the sack. Just the same, he’s the smartest Englishman I’ve met. By Jingo, I would like to hear his last words on this planet of ours even as I would like to have heard Heine’s grand: ‘Never mind my sins, God will forgive them. Forgiving is his business.’”

Of the pair of geniuses, Mark died first (April 21, 1910), and both left characteristic utterances. Mark said to his physician:

“Good-by. _If_ we meet----”

Labouchère, shortly before his end, had been lectured by a sister or brother on the godless life he had led and had been assured that, if God didn’t take pity on him, he would certainly go to a hot place. An hour or so after listening to these comforting remarks, Labouchère had what Twain called on another occasion a “fair wind for Paradise,” _i. e._, he was dying and knew it. Now it happened that during the last half-minute of his life a spirit lamp in the next room exploded with a loud bang. Labouchère raised his head a bit and said feebly:

“What--_already_?”

One more gasp and he was dead. How Mark would have enjoyed Labby’s: “What, already?”

What May Happen To You After You Are Dead

With Richard Harding Davis I had covered the coronation of the Czar in Moscow and Mark could never get enough of that trip, asking me a thousand questions about the country and people. But what most interested him was the fact that they had taken Carlyle’s Cromwell away from me at the frontier. “You can have it back when you return,” said the Russian customs people, but they stuck to my book just the same.

“Maybe they will start a revolution on the strength of Carlyle,” said Mark. “I hope they will.”

“Talking of Cromwell--I am glad they have no Westminster Abbey in the States. And here is why. This man Cromwell was alternately an anarchist and an autocrat. More powerful than any king, he refused the crown, yet made Parliament accept his imbecile son as his successor. They buried him in Westminster Abbey with all the honors due a king and after two years dragged his body out and beheaded the poor carcass, then stuck the head on a pike, mounted on Parliament House. You say even if we had a Westminster Abbey in America and I was buried there, yet the things that happened to Cromwell could never happen to me. But I don’t know about that. When I was in Paris last, somebody offered me a tooth out of the head of Turenne, who had been buried two hundred years or more. How did he get that tooth? Why, during the revolution the Jacobins--ancestors of our present-day anarchists--smashed the royal graves at Saint Denis and flung the royal bones to the winds. Turenne happened to have been buried among his peers at the feet of Louis XIV. That is the reason why he was dispossessed. Now comes a commercially inclined Frenchman who had read that Turenne had been blessed with exceptionally fine molars. So he breaks all the teeth out of the dead man’s jaws and sells them to the highest bidder. I was told there was only one left and I could have it for 100 francs. But I was more interested in my own teeth than in Turenne’s and refused to do business with the antiquarian. However, to have my little joke I said to him, ‘If you had the “Henri Quatre” of the 4th Henry I might buy.’

“‘The Jacobins plucked that out, too,’ he replied, ‘but there isn’t a hair left for sale nowadays. However, I may locate one or more by diligent hunting and I’ll let you know if I succeed.’

“Think of it! Henri Quatre’s Henri Quatre torn out by the roots and sold at so much per hair! That mustache and goatee that was next to so many sweet lips--the sweetest in France. I have seen the originals of some of his letters in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, and had some of those little masterpieces of grace translated for me.”

Mark took out his Paris notebook and read:

“‘My true heart,’ he wrote at one time to Diane de Poitiers, ‘you have lied. I shall not see you for ten days. It is enough to kill me. I will not tell you how much I care, it would make you too vain, and I think you love me, so with a happy heart I finish.’

“In answer Diane wrote back, ‘If I die, have me opened and you will find your image engraved on my heart.’”

Kings In Their Birthday Suits

Two things Mark Twain was especially concerned about--the success of his “Joan of Arc,” which he considered his best work, and the possibility of getting King Leopold hanged.

Leopold and the Czar were his special bêtes noires. “I’d like to see these two fellows face their people naked except for their whiskers. Let them face public opinion in their birthday suits and see what will happen to them.”

Mark On Lincoln’S Humanity

When Ida M. Tarbell’s “Life of Lincoln” was running in McClure’s during the late nineties, Mark said at luncheon at the Cafe Ronacher, Vienna, one afternoon: “That woman is writing a wonderfully good and accurate, intimate and comprehensive book and I _do_ hope that, in the end, she will give the same prominence to Lincoln’s correspondence on pardons as to other state papers of his. When you come to think of it, a lot of nonentities have got credit for able state papers, but it takes humanity to commute a sentence of death and Lincoln has commuted thousands. The only one he didn’t and couldn’t commute was one imposed by our friend, Ward Hill Lamon.

“Lamon, then Marshal of the District of Columbia, had seen Lincoln safely home and then made his usual rounds of the White House grounds. All seemed well, no cause for suspicion, Ward told me, and he was about to retire, when he thought he saw some movement amid a clump of green foliage. It looked as if a body was rising from the ground.

“‘I reached the spot by three leaps, faced a dark figure and, without ado, dealt him a blow square between the eyes, knocking him down,’ said the Marshal.

“Well,” continued Mark, “you know Lamon as he looks now, still a commanding figure, though worried and weakened by diabetes. In the early sixties he was a giant, a John L. Sullivan as a hitter. That blow of his killed the stranger in the White House grounds and when the body was carried to the Secret Service offices and searched, they found it to be that of a Southern gentleman of distinguished family. He had two pistols and two heinous looking knives on him--undoubtedly Ward had stopped short the career of one of the forerunners of John Wilkes Booth, postponing the great tragedy several months--I have forgotten the date. Wait, it happened during the night when Lamon brought the President back from the Soldiers’ Home, outside of Washington.

“Lincoln’s visit to the Soldiers’ Home was not on the schedule, Lamon told me, and he was surprised and angered when, calling at the White House, he heard of his riding away all by himself, for it was just such opportunities as would-be assassins were looking for.

“At the stables Lamon learned that the President came there in person, ordered ‘Old Abe,’ his favorite army mule, saddled and, half an hour ago, rode away as carelessly as any private citizen might do. There was a grain of comfort in the character of the mount selected, for ‘Old Abe’ wouldn’t go faster than a dogtrot if you beat him to death. So Lamon selected the fastest horse he could borrow and in a twinkling was en route for the Soldiers’ Home. As calculated, he met the President half-way down the road and Lincoln, far from suspecting that the Marshal was on his trail, invited him to come along and have some fun. Well, the President had a jolly time at the Soldiers’ Home, swapping stories with veterans and boys, listening to the singing, declaiming poetry and forgetting the care of his exalted office.

“And he kept up the fun on the way home, talking t