otes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely
at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make
after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last
night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and
Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.

All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver a
gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,
--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic speech
made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it
in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug
island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects,
he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:

If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
nature.

And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
over.

He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was