bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract.

In the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each
were sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and
fifty thousand dollars was paid to Mrs. Grant. The first check of two
hundred thousand dollars, drawn February 27, 1886, remains the largest
single royalty check in history. Mark Twain's prophecy had been almost
exactly verified.

CLVII. MINOR MATTERS OF A GREAT YEAR

The Grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally
overshadowed other events of 1885. Mark Twain was so deeply absorbed in
this great publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy
in other directions.

Yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember.
Howells has told something of the Authors' Reading given for the
Longfellow Memorial, an entertainment managed by George Parsons Lathrop,
though Howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of
admission at five dollars. Then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of
Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced the attractions.

Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he introduced
him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before
he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are
the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of
Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day's
exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume
of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and
whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science
owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to
burst forth, he began to read.

Howells tells of Mark Twain's triumph on this occasion, and in a letter
at the time he wrote: "You simply straddled down to the footlights and
took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it."

Howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars. This was
early in May.

Of literary work, beyond the war paper, the "Private History of a
Campaign that Failed" (published December, 1885), Clemens appears to
have done very little. His thoughts were far too busy