Page:Boys Life of Mark Twain.djvu/363

 LXI

OLLOWING his birthday dinner, Mark Twain had become once more the "Belle of New York," and in a larger way than ever before. An editorial in the Evening Mail referred to him as a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American metropolis, and added:

Things have reached a point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement.

He loved the excitement of it, and it no longer seemed to wear upon him. Scarcely an evening passed that he did not go out to some dinner or gathering where he had promised to speak. In April, for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Society, he delivered his farewell lecture—the last lecture, he said, where any one would have to pay to hear him. It was at Carnegie Hall, and the great place was jammed. As he stood before that vast, shouting audience, I wondered if he was remembering that night, forty years before in San Francisco, when his lecture career had begun. We hoped he might speak of it, but he did not do so.