ome remote and unfamiliar
star.

Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry
Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those
names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are
only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[Clemens
had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. "I first met him when he
reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation
where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]

LXXXVI. ENGLAND

From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be
called a gloomy one.

Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they
could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.
Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The
White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the
sensation of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was
greeted with wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too
eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible
to American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American
habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella
that an Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and
regarded as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.

The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin
Miller writes:

He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.

Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and
Canon Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote,
asking for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel.
Indeed, it was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he
had come into his rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts
concerning him in America, there was no question in England. Howells
says: