Page:Boys Life of Mark Twain.djvu/190

 energetic person, had proposed the lecture idea as soon as Mark Twain arrived in New York. Clemens shook his head. "I have no reputation with the general public here," he said. "We couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me." But Fuller insisted, and eventually engaged the largest hall in New York, the Cooper Union. Full of enthusiasm and excitement, he plunged into the business of announcing and advertising his attraction, and inventing schemes for the sale of seats. Clemens caught Fuller's enthusiasm by spells, but between times he was deeply depressed. Fuller had got up a lot of tiny hand-bills, and had arranged to hang bunches of these in the horse-cars. The little dangling clusters fascinated Clemens, and he rode about to see if anybody else noticed them. Finally, after a long time, a passenger pulled off one of the bills and glanced at it. A man with him asked:

"Who's Mark Twain?" "Goodness knows! I don't."

The lecturer could not ride any farther. He hunted up his patron. "Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign—a ripple of interest." Fuller assured him that things were "working underneath," and would be all right. But Clemens wrote home: "Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark." And he added that, after hiring the largest house in New York, he must play against Schuyler Colfax, Ristori, and a double troupe of Japanese jugglers, at other places of amusement.