in the private dining-room,
where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty
when expanded to its limit. That room and that table have mingled with
much distinguished entertainment, also with history. Henry James made
his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed
it was his first, though this is by the way.

A letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for
the Prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room
on the 5th of January. It was not an invitation, but a gracious
privilege. I was in New York a day or two in advance of the date, and
I think David Munro was the first person I met at The Players. As he
greeted me his eyes were eager with something he knew I would wish to
hear. He had been delegated to propose the dinner to Mark Twain, and had
found him propped up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of
the Nast book. I suspect that Munro had led him to speak of it, and that
the result had lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of
his.

The night of January 5, 1906, remains a memory apart from other dinners.
Brander Matthews presided, and Gilder was there, and Frank Millet and
Willard Metcalf and Robert Reid, and a score of others; some of them are
dead now, David Munro among them. It so happened that my seat was nearly
facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of The Players, is
placed at the side and not at the end of the long table. He was no
longer frail and thin, as when I had first met him. He had a robust,
rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. Lit
by the glow of the shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of
the walls, he made a picture of striking beauty. One could not take
his eyes from it, and to one guest at least it stirred the farthest
memories. I suddenly saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in
the Middle West, where I had first heard uttered the name of Mark Twain,
and where night after night a group gathered around the evening lamp
to hear the tale of the first pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had
seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy tale. To Charles Harvey Genung,
who sat next to me, I whispered something of this, and how, during the
thirty-six years since then, no other human being to me had meant quite
what Mark Twain had meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable
thing which means more than either, and which we ca