fault have been with
me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was
going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I
showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully
funny if you show that you are afraid of it. Well, I can't account for
it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back
here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old
speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all
over that stage. Oh, the fault must have been with _me_, it is not in
the speech at all.

[_Dictated October 3, 1907._] In some ways, I was always honest; even
from my earliest years I could never bring myself to use money which I
had acquired in questionable ways; many a time I tried, but principle
was always stronger than desire. Six or eight months ago,
Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles was given a great dinner-party in New
York, and when he and I were chatting together in the drawing-room
before going out to dinner he said,

"I've known you as much as thirty years, isn't it?"

I said, "Yes, that's about it, I think."

He mused a moment or two and then said,

"I wonder we didn't meet in Washington in 1867; you were there at that
time, weren't you?"

I said, "Yes, but there was a difference; I was not known then; I had
not begun to bud--I was an obscurity; but you had been adding to your
fine Civil War record; you had just come back from your brilliant
Indian campaign in the Far West, and had been rewarded with a
brigadier-generalship in the regular army, and everybody was talking
about you and praising you. If you had met me, you wouldn't be able to
remember it now--unless some unusual circumstance of the meeting had
burnt it into your memory. It is forty years ago, and people don't
remember nobodies over a stretch of time like that."

I didn't wish to continue the conversation along that line, so I changed
the subject. I could have proven to him, without any trouble, that we
did meet in Washington in 1867, but I thought it might embarrass one or
the other of us, so I didn't do it. I remember the incident very well.
This was the way of it:

I had just come back from the Quaker City Excursion, and had made a
contract with Bliss of Hartford to write "The Innocents Abroad." I was
out of money, and I went down to Washington to see if I could earn
enough there to keep me in bread and butter while I should write