ack Flag.
Guard of Honor--Missionaries and German, French, Russian, and
British soldiers laden with loot.

And so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by
the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture,
mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses. At
the end of all, banners inscribed:

"All White Men are Born Free and Equal."

"Christ died to make men holy,
Christ died to make men free."

with the American flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of
Lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful
aspect over the far-reaching pageant. With much more of the same sort.
It is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for Mrs. Clemens
ever to consent to its publication.

Advancing years did little toward destroying Mark Twain's interest in
human affairs. At no time in his life was he more variously concerned
and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary,
political, religious, financial, scientific. He was always alive, young,
actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise,
though never less than important to him.

He had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find
dazzlingly new ways for investing it. As in the old days, he was always
putting "twenty-five or forty thousand dollars," as he said, into
something that promised multiplied returns. Howells tells how he found
him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he
learned that it was plasmon.

I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped
for," and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after
paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do
something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not
make a fortune out of plasmon.

It was just at this period (the beginning of 1902) that he was promoting
with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in America,
investing in it one of the "usual amounts," promising to make Howells
over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate. Once he wrote
him explicit instructions:

Yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer
of desired results. If you wish to be elaborate--which isn't
necessary--put a couple of heapin