Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/177

 definite meaning for us; it occurred to us at that time because of some tremendous though unavailing blows which Mark Twain had delivered against our government's policy in the Philippines, the time falling in that era of khaki imperialism which opened in this land with the Spanish war and too much reading of Kipling, who, if I could bring myself to think that literature has any influence in America, might be said to have induced us to imitate England in her colonial policy. There comes back the picture of Mark Twain as he sat on the veranda of the home he had that summer at Sewell's Bridge, a cottage on a hill all hidden among the pines; he sat there in his picturesque costume of white trousers and blue jacket, with his splendid plume of white hair, and he smoked cigar after cigar—he was an "end to end smoker" as George Ade says—and as he sat and smoked he drawled a delightful monologue about some of his experiences with apparitions and telepathy and that weird sort of thing; he said they were not to be published during his life, and since his death I have been waiting to see them in print. He had just been made a Doctor of Laws by some university in June of that year, a distinguishing fact known to a caller from the fashionable resort of York near by, who, though somewhat hazy as to Mark Twain's performances in literature, nevertheless scrupulously addressed him as "Doctor," and every time he was thus recognized in his new and scholarly dignity, he winked at us from under his shaggy brows. Perhaps that was part of his Americanism, too, unless it were a part of that universality