was carried to the dead-room
and I went away for a while to a citizen's house and slept off some of
my accumulated fatigue--and meantime something was happening. The
coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this
instance some of the ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty
dollars and bought a metallic case, and when I came back and entered the
dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of
my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last
sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of
several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these
details went--and I think I missed one detail; but that one was
immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place
with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre
of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

I told the dream there in the Club that night just as I have told it
here.

Rev. Dr. Burton swung his leonine head around, focussed me with his eye,
and said:

"When was it that this happened?"

"In June, '58."

"It is a good many years ago. Have you told it several times since?"

"Yes, I have, a good many times."

"How many?"

"Why, I don't know how many."

"Well, strike an average. How many times a year do you think you have
told it?"

"Well, I have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener."

"Very well, then you've told it, we'll say, seventy or eighty times
since it happened?"

"Yes," I said, "that's a conservative estimate."

"Now then, Mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many
years ago, and I used to tell it a number of times--a good many
times--every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the
hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time. I
never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages
through repetition until one day after I had been telling it ten or
fifteen years it struck me that either I was getting old, and slow in
delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born.
Mark, I diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result:
that I found that its proportions were now, as nearly as I could make
oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact,
and twenty-four parts embroidery. I never told that tale afterwards--I
was never able to tell it again, for I