cipal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....

At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:

"Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this
suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last
lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr.
Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you."

The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head
of "Cracking jokes," gave three pages, to praise of the literary and
lecture methods of the new American humorist. With the promise of speedy
return, he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his
party (October 21st) set sail for home.

In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:

We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two
hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
span and a whisper would bridge the distance.

So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful
half-year, that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most tender.

XCII. FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS

Orion Clemens records that he met "Sam and Livy" on their arrival from
England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library
Association sent up his card "four times," in the hope of getting a
chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed
Orion deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance. Orion
himself was by this time engaged in various projects. He was inventing
a flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading
proof on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field. This
great blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little
boy who used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and
cry over the dirty proof, made him gasp.

They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to
come be