il Clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the
Kanawha, which this time would sail for the Bahama and West India
islands. The guests were to be about the same.--[The invited ones of
the party were Hon. T. B. Reed, A. G. Paine, Laurence Hutton, Dr. C. C.
Rice, W. T. Foote, and S. L. Clemens. "Owners of the yacht," Mr. Rogers
called them, signing himself as "Their Guest."]

He sent this telegram:

H. H. ROGERS, Fairhaven, Mass.

Can't get away this week. I have company here from tonight till
middle of next week. Will Kanawha be sailing after that & can I go as
Sunday-school superintendent at half rate? Answer and prepay.

DR. CLEMENS.

The sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy
cruise among those balmy islands. Mark Twain was particularly fond
of "Tom" Reed, who had been known as "Czar" Reed in Congress, but was
delightfully human in his personal life. They argued politics a good
deal, and Reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge
of the subject, confessed that he "couldn't argue with a man like that."

"Do you believe the things you say?" he asked once, in his thin,
falsetto voice.

"Yes," said Clemens. "Some of them."

"Well, you want to look out. If you go on this way, by and by you'll get
to believing nearly everything you say."

Draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion. Clemens in his
notes reports that off the coast of Florida Reed won twenty-three pots
in succession. It was said afterward that they made no stops at any
harbor; that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told
them they were about to enter some important port he received peremptory
orders to "sail on and not interrupt the game." This, however, may be
regarded as more or less founded on fiction.

CCXX. MARK TWAIN AND THE PHILIPPINES

Among the completed manuscripts of the early part of 1902 was a North
American Review article (published in April)--"Does the Race of Man
Love a Lord?"--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal
weakness. There were also some papers on the Philippine situation. In
one of these Clemens wrote:

We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with
real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness
we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon
them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when
we had no further use fo