ewers, blaring would come with a plan to
drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common
Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was
gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and
Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till
well toward the winter twilight.

He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
the now worn-out Authors' Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum
to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
(everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved
irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he
introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded
of Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long
day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a
volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his
triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the
first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was
such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public
performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he