s not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally
invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial
power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by "banging the
Bible"--(your own words). You have reached a time of life when it
is not wise to take these risks. You would better jump around. We
all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon
us. Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were
gray it would have excited remark.

Mrs. Clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great
hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens took up some work--a new Huck
Finn story, inspired by his trip to Hannibal. It was to have two parts
--Huck and Tom in youth, and then their return in old age. He did some
chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to Howells of his plan. Howells
answered:

It is a great lay-out: what I shall enjoy most will be the return of
the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying. There is a
matchless chance there. I suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in
this prefatory part.

But the new story did not reach completion. Huck and Tom would not come
back, even to go over the old scenes.

CCXXIV

THE SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY DINNER

It was on the evening of the 27th of November, 1902, I at the
Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col. George Harvey, president of
the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his
sixty-seventh birthday. The actual date fell three days later; but that
would bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be more
than likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was chosen.
Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers with a
poem, "A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain," which closed:

Still, to have everything beyond cavil right,
We will dine with you here till Sunday night.

Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he
would ever make, as it was also one of his best. All the speakers did
well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in
oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne
MacVeagh. Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems. The
chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by
maintaining an attitude of "thinking ambassador" for the guest of the
evening, gently pushing Cle