say this from any sense of the
fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the
wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no
longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the
hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and
Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom, "Well, Mark, you're a funny
fellow." It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
seemed unable to accept the tribute.

I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as
light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I
am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow,
a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and
said, "Ah, he is a wag!" and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep
emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost
an instant in replying to Clemens's letter, and assuring him that there
had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the
matter again. "He said that he was a fool, but he was God's fool,"
Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the
humor of the self-abasement.

To me Clemens wrote a week later, "It doesn't get any better; it burns
like fire." But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but
rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have
conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our
civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a
break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time
came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the
incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't
admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all
witnesses at second hand