ing, and thereto her freightage of
precious spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of
the Orient. Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the
shrouds and squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy! What ship is that, and whence
and whither?' In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back,
through a speaking trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and
twenty-three days out from Canton homeward bound! What ship is that?'
The little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most humbly
he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary Ann--fourteen hours from Boston, bound
for Kittery Point with--with nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word
'only' expressed the deeps of his stricken humbleness.

"And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four
--not more than that--I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am
properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'
--fourteen hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all
the other twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the
stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and
laden with a rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken
to a wandering alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days
multiplied by five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and
twenty-three days out from Canton--homeward bound!"

Says "Charles Vale," in describing the scene "The audience sat
spellbound in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no
longer; and when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out
the words: 'I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days
out from Canton,' there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the
room to the other. It seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it
upset the orator: yet it was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after
a long pause, came the last two words--like that curious, detached and
high note in which a great piece of music suddenly ends--'Homeward
bound.' Again there was a cheer: but this time it was lower; it was
subdued; it was the fitting echo to the beautiful words--with their
double significance--the parting from a hospitable land, the return to
the native land. . . . Only a great litterateur could have conceived
such a passage: only a great orator could have so delivered it."

Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has
known. He claimed the