thanks in
proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your
feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you
overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of
you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought
of at all.

And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our
deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday.

The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press,
and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments
to Mark Twain. Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially:

For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine
gladness and joy to the millions of three continents.

It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he
had mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that
birthday evening, passed from the things of this world. Clemens felt his
death keenly, and in a "good-by" which he wrote for Harper's Weekly he
said:

His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and
met it half-way. Hence, he was "Tom" to the most of his friends and
to half of the nation....

I cannot remember back to a time when he was not "Tom" Reed to me,
nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed
by me. I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone
in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he
did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about
him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back
with usury when his turn came. The last speech he made was at my
birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his
text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later
I was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait
among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the
jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. These things happened
only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is
speaking of him as one who was. It seems incredible, impossible.
Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his
vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the
Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to
dust in a moment.