so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I
can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.

Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal
more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he had
prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he
had contemplated. Years after he was one day found drifting off the
shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.

Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second
London lecture period. His response to the toast of the "Ladies,"
delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was
the sensational event of the evening.

He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,
whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
finale, when the welcome would be "none the less hearty," and bespoke his
attendance for any future dinners.

Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell:

I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large
enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find
that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall
and wonders that I could fill it so long.

I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.

In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's
paintings at the Royal Academy:

Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights
and dusks in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long
flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,
except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
the footpri