everal days, and Clemens
showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity.

It was hinted to Mark Twain that spring, that before leaving Vienna, it
would be proper for him to pay his respects to Emperor Franz Josef, who
had expressed a wish to meet him. Clemens promptly complied with the
formalities and the meeting was arranged. He had a warm admiration for
the Austrian Emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what he
wanted to say to him. He claimed afterward that he had compacted a sort
of speech into a single German sentence of eighteen words. He did not
make use of it, however. When he arrived at the royal palace and was
presented, the Emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way
that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared German
sentence. When he returned from the audience he said:

"We got along very well. I proposed to him a plan to exterminate the
human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two
minutes. I said Szczepanik would invent it for him. I think it
impressed him. After a while, in the course of our talk I remembered and
told the Emperor I had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had
forgotten it. He was very agreeable about it. He said a speech wasn't
necessary. He seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great
deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him. Necessarily he
must have or he couldn't have unbent to me as he did. I couldn't unbend
if I were an emperor. I should feel the stiffness of the position. Franz
Josef doesn't feel it. He is just a natural man, although an emperor. I
was greatly impressed by him, and I liked him exceedingly. His face is
always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of humor. It
is the Emperor's personality and the confidence all ranks have in him
that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside
appearance of being the opposite. He is a man as well as an emperor--an
emperor and a man."

Clemens and Howells were corresponding with something of the old-time
frequency. The work that Mark Twain was doing--thoughtful work with
serious intent--appealed strongly to Howells. He wrote:

You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is
no use saying anything else . . . . You have pervaded your
century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and
it is astonishing how you keep spreading . . . . You are my