setting, relating them was
enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a
heroic chapter in a unique career.

CCXLIII

AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING

Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. Among
them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters,
already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices
than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant,
and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the
list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the
highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the
letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens
proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens-Nast letters
brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief.
It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he heard of
it, said:

"I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this
country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes
to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That
forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars
after I'm dead."

A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the
secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not
entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow
them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see a
great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were
evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these
there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she
would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she
might sit face to face with the great man. It was in the morning hour
before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his
beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. She kept her
contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of
deepest reverence:

"May I kiss your hand?"

It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous.
Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small,
exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and
she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as
she went, she said