ecial coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and
banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town Hall. Clemens was
too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived
rested and fresh to respond to his toast. Perhaps because it was his
farewell speech in England, he made that night the most effective address
of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career:
He began by some light reference to the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels
and the State Regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his
charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and
with even greater variety. Then laying all levity aside, he told them,
like the Queen of Sheba, all that was in his heart.

. . . Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own
home beyond the ocean. Oxford has conferred upon me the highest
honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes. It is
the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others,
the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift
of man or state. During my four weeks' sojourn in England I have
had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has
flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all
these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the
heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend
from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red
blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me
humble, too. Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from
Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. It was like this: There was a
presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop
engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was
always hailing every ship that came in sight. He did it just to
hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. One day a majestic
Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering
into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull
burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious
spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the
Orient. It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! Of course
the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail,
"Ship aho