ggregate 800,000 cripples and 100,000 dead, drenched in
blood!

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

FOOTNOTE:

[17] It isn't yet. Title of it, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven."--S. L. C.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXII.

BY MARK TWAIN.

[Sidenote: (1890.)]

[_Dictated, October 10, 1906._] Susy has named a number of the friends
who were assembled at Onteora at the time of our visit, but there were
others--among them Laurence Hutton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Carroll
Beckwith, and their wives. It was a bright and jolly company. Some of
those choice spirits are still with us; the others have passed from this
life: Mrs. Clemens, Susy, Mr. Warner, Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton,
Dean Sage--peace to their ashes! Susy is in error in thinking Mrs. Dodge
was not there at that time; we were her guests.

We arrived at nightfall, dreary from a tiresome journey; but the
dreariness did not last. Mrs. Dodge had provided a home-made banquet,
and the happy company sat down to it, twenty strong, or more. Then the
thing happened which always happens at large dinners, and is always
exasperating: everybody talked to his elbow-mates and all talked at
once, and gradually raised their voices higher, and higher, and higher,
in the desperate effort to be heard. It was like a riot, an
insurrection; it was an intolerable volume of noise. Presently I said to
the lady next me--

"I will subdue this riot, I will silence this racket. There is only one
way to do it, but I know the art. You must tilt your head toward mine
and seem to be deeply interested in what I am saying; I will talk in a
low voice; then, just because our neighbors won't be able to hear me,
they will _want_ to hear me. If I mumble long enough--say two
minutes--you will see that the dialogues will one after another come to
a standstill, and there will be silence, not a sound anywhere but my
mumbling."

Then in a very low voice I began:

"When I went out to Chicago, eleven years ago, to witness the Grant
festivities, there was a great banquet on the first night, with six
hundred ex-soldiers present. The gentleman who sat next me was Mr. X. X.
He was very hard of hearing, and he had a habit common to deaf people of
shouting his remarks instead of delivering them in an ordinary voice. He
would handle his knife and fork in reflective silence for five or six
minutes at a tim