Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/155

 people, coming to the Cheese, ninety-nine per cent. do so because they don't know the man, and the others because they feel tickled to honor a writer a hundred and fifty years or so after he is good and rotten."

"Read Johnson plentifully, I suppose," mocked Bram Stoker, famous as author, critic, barrister and Henry Irving's associate.

"Not guilty—never a written word of his," answered honest Mark. "I gauge Johnson's character by his talks with that sot Bozzy, whom foolish old Carlyle called the greatest biographer ever because, I suppose, Bozzy interviewed Johnson on such momentous questions as: 'What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in the Tower with a baby?'"

"Well, what would you do," asked Bram.

"Throw it out of the window to a passing milkman, if it was weaned and if there was no cow around," said Mark.

When the merriment had subsided, Mark continued the slaughter of Johnson: "Why, he was a man who would have called brother a cannibal island king who had eaten a Jesuit, while he would have mobilized the whole British fleet against savages who dined off an Episcopalian."

"And if they had fried a Bishop of the established Church down in the Pacific?"

"Ask me something easier," answered Mark. "For all I know Johnson may have been the guy who invented a seething lake 151