ormance of the easy-going,
thick-headed Peter Spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it
hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it
delighted the audience beyond measure. No such impersonation of that.
character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. It was
repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of Peter, and it
could have been put on for a long run. Augustin Daly wrote immediately,
offering the Fifth Avenue Theater for a "benefit" performance, and again,
a few days later, urging acceptance. "Not for one night, but for many."

Clemens was tempted, no doubt. Perhaps, if he had yielded, he would
today have had one more claim on immortality.

CVII

HOWELLS, CLEMENS, AND "GEORGE"

Howells and Clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just
then. Clemens was particularly fond of the Boston crowd--Aldrich,
Fields, Osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners
which Osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext
or another. No man ever loved company more than Osgood, or to play the
part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. His dinners were
elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and
sometimes their wives) gathered. They were happy reunions, those
fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at
the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually Aldrich,
Howells, and Clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and
into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow
one seems never to find any more.

On one of the visits which Howells made to Hartford that year he took his
son John, then a small boy, with him. John was about six years old at
the time, with his head full of stories of Aladdin, and of other Arabian
fancies. On the way over his father said to him:

"Now, John, you will see a perfect palace."

They arrived, and John was awed into silence by the magnificence and
splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash
off the dust of travel. There he happened to notice a cake of pink soap.

"Why," he said, "they've even got their soap painted!" Next morning he
woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor
--and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the
dining-room, he saw the colored butler, George--the immortal
George--setting the breakfast