t
the end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;
and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.

"Don't you dare to refuse the invitation," said Howells, and naturally
Clemens didn't, and wrote back:

I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you
and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses
Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.

Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and Howells
were not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the
old-fashioned black "string" tie, a Western survival), so they made him
a present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford.
Next day he wrote:

You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful
--Mrs. Clemens. For months--I may even say years--she has shown an
unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
getting so far as to threaten it.

When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.

It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no
more to the earlier mode.

Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens, returning to Hartford,
put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
of sending one a week for a year. Then he concluded that this was too
slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to "His Grace of
Ponkapog."

Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. "The police," he said,
"are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort."

On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs
and prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage
was known to the police as Mark Twain, alias "The Jumping Frog," a
well