Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/223

 "That little blackmailer," he said, "was impertinent only to make me mad, knowing full well that later I would chastise myself for being a brute—still with a dollar fine I got off cheap enough."

"He was a King even in his undershirt and drawers."—(A verse in one of Grillparzer's Tragedies—which caused the play to be put on the Index by the censor.) This amused Mark hugely. But he had no sympathy with the author, saying: "He ought to have put pajamas on the cuss."

Mark Twain, when speaking of a king was fond of quoting Shakespeare's: "I have an humour to knock you indifferently well." (Henry V.)

"I have been blowing the heads off frothing pots of porter."—Mark Twain after writing his Czar's Soliloquy.

A Hamburg dealer in curiosities offered to sell Clemens two of Bismarck's hairs for a hundred marks a hair. Mark asked his secretary to write back that, according to the most reliable statistics, Bismarck had rejoiced in the possession of three hairs only and of that trinity enough had been sold already to cover the pates of a whole row full of bald heads on a first night in Broadway, New York. 219