Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/51

 "ELIZABETH WAS A HE," SAID MARK

"Mark my word, Elizabeth was a he," said Clemens, when I was starting for London the end of June, 1894, leaving the Clemenses at the Normandie, Paris, "and when you have a little time in England, I wish you would look up all that pesky question for me."

"Not in Westminster Abbey?" I cried in alarm.

"Now, don't you try to be gay," said Mark. "It's bad enough if I got that reputation when I want to be taken seriously. I know they haven't got through ascertaining for the 'teenth time whether Charles I really lost his head when his overbearing noddle dropped into the basket on the scaffold opposite the Horse-Guards—you showed me the spot yourself. I don't want any ghoulish work done. Just go to the British Museum and every other library and nose up everything appertaining to Queen Elizabeth's manly character. You get the authorities (for a consideration, of course) and I'll do the rest. Then you go down Surrey-way and find a place or castle or summer house called Overcourt, or something. That's where Elizabeth lived in her teens, and metamorphosed into a boy."

"But the editor will never allow you to write on such a subject. Better let me do it."

"Not on your life," said Mark. "It's my discovery, and I'm paying you for the work you do, just as the New York 'World' and the 47