extravagance.

Last week I was going down with the family to Budapest to lecture,
and to make a speech at a banquet. Just as I was leaving here I got a
telegram from London asking for the speech for a New York paper. I (this
is strictly private) sent it. And then I didn't make that speech, but
another of a quite different character--a speech born of something which
the introducer said. If that said speech got cabled and printed, you
needn't let on that it was never uttered.

That was a darling night, and those Hungarians were lively people. We
were there a week and had a great time. At the banquet I heard their
chief orator make a most graceful and easy and beautiful and delicious
speech--I never heard one that enchanted me more--although I did not
understand a word of it, since it was in Hungarian. But the art of
it!--it was superlative.

They are wonderful English scholars, these people; my lecture
audience--all Hungarians--understood me perfectly--to judge by the
effects. The English clergyman told me that in his congregation are 150
young English women who earn their living teaching their language; and
that there are others besides these.

For 60 cents a week the telephone reads the morning news to you at home;
gives you the stocks and markets at noon; gives you lessons in 3 foreign
languages during 3 hours; gives you the afternoon telegrams; and
at night the concerts and operas. Of course even the clerks and
seamstresses and bootblacks and everybody else are subscribers.

(Correction. Mrs. Clemens says it is 60 cents a month.)

I am renewing my youth. I made 4 speeches at one banquet here last
Saturday night. And I've been to a lot of football matches.

Jean has been in here examining the poll for the Immortals
("Literature," March 24,) in the hope, I think, that at last she should
find me at the top and you in second place; and if that is her ambition
she has suffered disappointment for the third time--and will never fare
any better, I hope, for you are where you belong, by every right. She
wanted to know who it is that does the voting, but I was not able to
tell her. Nor when the election will be completed and decided.

Next Morning. I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every
morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and
basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and
cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of
the huma