Page:Boys Life of Mark Twain.djvu/377

A DEGREE FROM OXFORD gathering everywhere to see him pass. At Oxford when he appeared on the street the name Mark Twain ran up and down like a cry of fire, and the people came running. When he appeared on the stage at the Sheldonian Theater to receive his degree, clad in his doctor's robe of scarlet and gray, there arose a great tumult—the shouting of the undergraduates for the boy who had been Tom Sawyer and had played with Huckleberry Finn. The papers next day spoke of his reception as a "cyclone," surpassing any other welcome, though Rudyard Kipling was one of those who received degrees on that occasion, and General Booth and Whitelaw Reid, and other famous men.

Perhaps the most distinguished social honor paid to Mark Twain at this time was the dinner given him by the staff of London Punch, in the historic Punch editorial rooms on Bouverie Street. No other foreigner had ever been invited to that sacred board, where Thackeray had sat, and Douglas Jerrold and others of the great departed. Punch had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon, and at this dinner the original drawing was presented to him by the editor's little daughter, Joy Agnew.

The Oxford degree, and the splendid homage paid him by England at large, became, as it were, the crowning episode of Mark Twain's career. I think he realized this, although he did not speak of it—indeed, he had very little to say of the whole matter. I telephoned a greeting when I knew that he had arrived in New York, and was summoned to "come down and play billiards." I confess I went with a 333