shall the
croaker presently come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and
say, Verily this plan is not well planned--and he will go his way; and
the obstructionist will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat
on,) and say, Behold, this is but a sick plan--and he will go his way;
and the man that knows it all will come, and lift up his voice, (having
his coat on,) and say, Lo, call they this a plan? then will he go his
way; and the places which knew him once shall know him no more forever,
because he was not, for God took him. Now therefore I say unto you,
Verily that house will not be budded. And I say this also: He that
waiteth for all men to be satisfied with his plan, let him seek eternal
life, for he shall need it.'"

This portion of Mr. Twichell's sermon made a great impression upon me,
and I was grieved that some one had not wakened me earlier so that I
might have heard what went before.

S. L. CLEMENS.

Mr. Sykes (of the firm of Sykes & Newton, the Allen House Pharmacy)
replied that he had read the letter to the committee and that it had
set those gentlemen right who had not before understood the
situation. "If others were as ready to do their part as yourself
our poor would not want assistance," he said, in closing.

We come now to an incident which assumes the proportions of an
episode-even of a catastrophe--in Mark Twain's career. The disaster
was due to a condition noted a few pages earlier--the inability of
genius to judge its own efforts. The story has now become history
--printed history--it having been sympathetically told by Howells in
My Mark Twain, and more exhaustively, with a report of the speech
that invited the lightning, in a former work by the present writer.

The speech was made at John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday
dinner, given by the Atlantic staff on the evening of December 17,
1877. It was intended as a huge joke--a joke that would shake the
sides of these venerable Boston deities, Longfellow, Emerson,
Holmes, and the rest of that venerated group. Clemens had been a
favorite at the Atlantic lunches and dinners--a speech by him always
an event. This time he decided to outdo himself.

He did that, but not in the way he had intended. To use one of his
own metaphors, he stepped out to meet the rainbow and got struck b