always been since O'Mulligan the
First established that faith in the Empire.

And we canvassed everybody. Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came
in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his
earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor--but
he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for
engaging in the same enterprise. He was as chaffy as he was sixty years
ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston--but
there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace
of God he got the opportunity.

The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy
and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred with the
wounds got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a
high chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny. His
granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately warned to the youngest of the
Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the
Howells's may reign in the land? I must not forget to say, while I think
of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. Keep
your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat
your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. Would you believe it?--the
Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. They
call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it
thunders she looks up expectantly and says "come in....."

The monument to the author of "Gloverson and His Silent partners" is
finished. It is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the
memory of any man. This noble classic has now been translated into all
the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all
creatures. Yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I
do with my own great-grandchildren.

I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog. I love them as dearly
as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on
idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless
anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had
jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog
still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it.
Perhaps his best effort of late years is this:

"O soul, soul, soul of mine:
Soul, soul, soul of thine!