lf
down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea where I
am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say, "How
far is it to Charing Cross?" "Shilling fare in a cab," and off he goes.
I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime
to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. But I am
trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and
historical reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies.
'Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it. The name
of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and
the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who
came among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and
gave him a welcome and a home--Artemus Ward. Asking that you will join
me, I give you his Memory.

APPENDIX M

LETTER WRITTEN TO MRS. CLEMENS FROM BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1874, PROPHESYING
A MONARCHY IN SIXTY-ONE YEARS.

(See Chapter xcvii)

BOSTON, November 16, 1935.

DEAR LIVY,--You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name
it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick.

The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this
letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let
them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I
will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed,
holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a
thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of
it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed
and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph
you what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so
debase myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full
of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing"
I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings
me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old day such a gathering
talked pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times,
than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in
this mad generation.

It is sixty years since I was here before. I walked hither then with my
precious old friend. It seems incredible now that we did it in two days,
but such is my recollection.