ncerns The Player egg-cups. They easily hold two
eggs, but not three. One morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast
order. Clemens said:

"Boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me."

By and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. Clemens looked at
the egg portion and asked:

"Boy, what was my order?"

"Three soft eggs broken in the cup, Mr. Clemens."

"And you've filled that order, have you?"

"Yes, Mr. Clemens."

"Boy, you are trifling with the truth; I've been trying all winter to
get three eggs into that cup."]

In one letter he tells of a dinner with his old Comstock friend, John
Mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and
corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in
prosperous moments, thirty years before.

"The guests were old gray Pacific coasters," he said, "whom I knew when
they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when we went
gipsying-along time ago--thirty years."

Indeed, it was a talk of the dead. Mainly that. And of how they looked &
the harum-scarum things they did & said. For there were no cares in that
life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-fourths
of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy. Of the midnight
highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the
windswept & desolate Gold Hill Divide no witness was left but me, the
victim. Those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the
particulars of that old forgotten crime.

In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at
Robert Reid's studio. There were present, he says:

Coquelin;
Richard Harding Davis;
Harrison, the great outdoor painter;
Wm. H. Chase, the artist;
Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph;
Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article
about him in Jan. or Feb. Century.
John Drew, actor;
James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him!
Smedley, the artist;
Zorn, " "
Zogbaum, " "
Reinhart, " "
Metcalf, " "
Ancona, head tenor at the Opera;

Oh, & a great lot of others. Everybody there had done something &
was in his way famous.

Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew
did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did
some excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical
Englishman telling