uld 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 head 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