nearly so
frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet
old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving
the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the
character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who
was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and
was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim
report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had
found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact,
sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness,
and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens
often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a
dinner, but now he was silent, as if "high sorrowful and cloyed"; and it
was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed
for the actor.

He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
eventuated with him in his theory of what he called "the damned human
race." This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was
about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
reflection that now she should not hear so much about "the damned human
race." He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
whiteness should have been