y
lightning. His joke was not of the Boston kind or size. When its
full nature burst upon the company--when the ears of the assembled
diners heard the sacred names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes
lightly associated with human aspects removed--oh, very far removed
--from Cambridge and Concord, a chill fell upon the diners that
presently became amazement, and then creeping paralysis. Nobody
knew afterward whether the great speech that he had so gaily planned
ever came to a natural end or not. Somebody--the next on the
program--attempted to follow him, but presently the company melted
out of the doors and crept away into the night.

It seemed to Mark Twain that his career had come to an end. Back in
Hartford, sweating and suffering through sleepless nights, he wrote
Howells his anguish.

*****

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

Sunday Night. 1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see
that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies--a list of
humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which
keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies.

I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore
it will be best that I retire from before the public at present. It
will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now. So it is my
opinion and my wife's that the telephone story had better be suppressed.
Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the
same on some future occasion?

It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw
no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much.
And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing
me! It burns me like fire to think of it.

The whole matter is a dreadful subject--let me drop it here--at least on
paper.

Penitently yrs,
MARK.

Howells sent back a comforting letter. "I have no idea of dropping
you out of the Atlantic," he wrote; "and Mr. Houghton has still
less, if possible. You are going to help and not hurt us many a
year yet, if you will.... You are not going to be floored by it;
there is more justice than that, even in this world."

Howells added that Charles Elliot Nor