s may be in the next world, but in this one I
shall never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near
me, tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp.
There was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had
good intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It
was an atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's
salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put
into Cellini's autobiography. There was a frightful pause. There was an
awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had
to get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just
burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had
appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a place which would make any novel
respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel itself was
recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. Bishop was
away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest,
consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may
say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from
Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands
ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for
the first time in his life speak in public. It was under these damaging
conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I had
spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able to go
on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop had
had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities--facing those
other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time
in his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away
in his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard
from. I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that
dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head
like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there
wasn't any fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last long. It was not
many sentence's after his first before he began to hesitate, and break,
and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down
in a limp and mushy pile.

Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than
one-third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The next man hadn't
str