han a limp blanket
or sheet, and anybody could see that there were two of us under it. It
didn't remain two very long. Mrs. Bowen snatched me out of the bed and
conducted me home herself, with a grip on my collar which she never
loosened until she delivered me into my mother's hands along with her
opinion of that kind of a boy.

It was a good case of measles that resulted. It brought me within a
shade of death's door. It brought me to where I no longer took any
interest in anything, but, on the contrary, felt a total absence of
interest--which was most placid and enchanting. I have never enjoyed
anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time. I _was_, in
effect, dying. The word had been passed and the family notified to
assemble around the bed and see me off. I knew them all. There was no
doubtfulness in my vision. They were all crying, but that did not affect
me. I took but the vaguest interest in it, and that merely because I was
the centre of all this emotional attention and was gratified by it and
vain of it.

When Dr. Cunningham had made up his mind that nothing more could be done
for me he put bags of hot ashes all over me. He put them on my breast,
on my wrists, on my ankles; and so, very much to his astonishment--and
doubtless to my regret--he dragged me back into this world and set me
going again.

[_Dictated July 26, 1907._] In an article entitled "England's Ovation to
Mark Twain," Sydney Brooks--but never mind that, now.

I was in Oxford by seven o'clock that evening (June 25, 1907), and
trying on the scarlet gown which the tailor had been constructing, and
found it right--right and surpassingly becoming. At half past ten the
next morning we assembled at All Souls College and marched thence,
gowned, mortar-boarded and in double file, down a long street to the
Sheldonian Theatre, between solid walls of the populace, very much
hurrah'd and limitlessly kodak'd. We made a procession of considerable
length and distinction and picturesqueness, with the Chancellor, Lord
Curzon, late Viceroy of India, in his rich robe of black and gold, in
the lead, followed by a pair of trim little boy train-bearers, and the
train-bearers followed by the young Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was
to be made a D.C.L. The detachment of D.C.L.'s were followed by the
Doctors of Science, and these by the Doctors of Literature, and these
in turn by the Doctors of Music. Sidney Colvin marched in front of me; I
was coupled