ead for having
enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder,
the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the
burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There
fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened
from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and
blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed
down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at
his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not
know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him
standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his
jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and
regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily
writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of
Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion
of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those
later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to
the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the
fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the
wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no
longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the
hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and
Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom, "Well, Mark, you're a funny
fellow." It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
seemed unable to accept the tribute.

I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as
light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But