a few years younger I would accept it, and promptly, and I
would go. I would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me I
would talk--just talk. I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and
talk--and have the time of my life! I would march the unforgotten and
unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent
hail and farewell as they passed--Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry,
Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart, Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton,
North, Root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the
desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the "slaughter-house," a precious
possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake,
Jack Williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and
so on. Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more
good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are
going now.

Those were the days!--those old ones. They will come no more; youth will
come no more. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there
have been no others like them. It chokes me up to think of them. Would
you like me to come out there and cry? It would not beseem my white
head.

Good-by. I drink to you all. Have a good time-and take an old man's
blessing.

In reply to another invitation from H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, he
wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to
sit by the fire for the rest of his "remnant of life."

A man who, like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next
November has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does
--that shameless old fictitious butterfly. (But if he comes don't
tell him I said it, for it would hurt him & I wouldn't brush a flake
of powder from his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his
indestructible youth anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.)

And it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after
this fashion:

I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old
residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully
300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was
suggested.

Which, by the way, is a perfect example of Mark Twain's humorous manner,
the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would
have been contented to end with the statement, "I could have gone
earlier." Only Mark Twain could have added t