eir homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their
means of livelihood. Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with
General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into
the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the
world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many
lands.

I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think
few took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the
entertainment would last, he had replied:

I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I
get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen
minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour.

There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The
house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that
often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. It did not
matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark
Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was
enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a
heroic chapter in a unique career.

CCXLIII. AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING

Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. Among
them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters,
already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices
than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant,
and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the
list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be
the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the
letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens
proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens-Nast letters
brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very
brief. It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he
heard of it, said:

"I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this
country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes
to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That
forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six
dollars after I'm dead."

A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept
the secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not
entertain their propositio