Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/147

 WHAT MAY HAPPEN TO YOU AFTER YOU ARE DEAD

With Richard Harding Davis I had covered the coronation of the Czar in Moscow and Mark could never get enough of that trip, asking me a thousand questions about the country and people. But what most interested him was the fact that they had taken Carlyle's Cromwell away from me at the frontier. "You can have it back when you return," said the Russian customs people, but they stuck to my book just the same.

"Maybe they will start a revolution on the strength of Carlyle," said Mark. "I hope they will."

"Talking of Cromwell—I am glad they have no Westminster Abbey in the States. And here is why. This man Cromwell was alternately an anarchist and an autocrat. More powerful than any king, he refused the crown, yet made Parliament accept his imbecile son as his successor. They buried him in Westminster Abbey with all the honors due a king and after two years dragged his body out and beheaded the poor carcass, then stuck the head on a pike, mounted on Parliament House. You say even if we had a Westminster Abbey in America and I was buried there, yet the things that happened to Cromwell could never happen to me. But I don't know about that. When I was in Paris last, somebody offered me a tooth 143