at
the risk of being instructive. People here seem always to express
distances by parables. To a stranger it is just a little confusing to be
so parabolic--so to speak. I collar a citizen, and I think I am going to
get some valuable information out of him. I ask him how far it is to
Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence. Now we
know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn. I find myself
down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea where I
am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say, "How far
is it to Charing Cross?" "Shilling fare in a cab," and off he goes. I
suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the
ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. But I am trespassing
upon your time with these geological statistics and historical
reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies. 'Tis a real
pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it. The name of the
Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and the
friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came
among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and gave
him a welcome and a home--Artemus Ward. Asking that you will join me, I
give you his Memory.

APPENDIX M

LETTER WRITTEN TO MRS. CLEMENS FROM BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1874, PROPHESYING A
MONARCHY IN SIXTY-ONE YEARS.

(See Chapter xcvii)

BOSTON, November 16, 1935.

DEAR LIVY,--You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name
it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick.

The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this
letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let
them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I
will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed,
holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a
thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it,
it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed and
resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you
what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so
debase myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full
of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing"
I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asth