Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/23

 from London to St. Petersburg, from Christiania to Madrid, from Havre to Frisco, and from Frisco to the Antipodes, while mine are nowhere."

After I visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana he said to me: "Lucky dog, you have broken bread with the man who commands, and almost monopolizes, the thought of the world."

That the universality of his humor and its humanity made him the peer of these great writers, of all his contemporaries in fact, seemed to be far from his thoughts. His verbal humor, like his fancy, was as simple in form and as direct in application as were the army orders of the great Napoleon. He liked to hear me say that, for he knew that some of my forbears had been individually attached to the person of the Emperor. But the most he ever said concerning his authorship and other writers in his own line was this:

"I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. Like you and Susie" (referring to his oldest daughter) "I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side."

One more of his sayings: At the unveiling of a bronze tablet to Eugene Field, Mark uttered these words: