cs which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain
succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a
train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of
chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the
brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had
attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He
believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech
of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was
the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California
mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as
respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail
according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling
this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.

But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was
the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those
nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so
that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling
spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his
fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to
the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense
hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to
enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor
Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even
this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have
overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have
overcome it at all.

The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred.
function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I
came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him
as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in
sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your h