s before.

"The guests were old gray Pacific coasters," he said, "whom I knew when
they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when we went
gipsying-along time ago--thirty years."

Indeed, it was a talk of the dead. Mainly that. And of how they looked
& the harum-scarum things they did & said. For there were no cares in
that life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (&
three-fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy. Of
the midnight highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my
head on the windswept & desolate Gold Hill Divide no witness was left but
me, the victim. Those old fools last night laughed till they cried over
the particulars of that old forgotten crime.

In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at
Robert Reid's studio. There were present, he says:

Coquelin;
Richard Harding Davis;
Harrison, the great outdoor painter;
Wm. H. Chase, the artist;
Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph;
Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article
about him in Jan. or Feb. Century.
John Drew, actor;
James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him!
Smedley, the artist;
Zorn, " "
Zogbaum, " "
Reinhart, " "
Metcalf, " "
Ancona, head tenor at the Opera;

Oh, & a great lot of others. Everybody there had done something &
was in his way famous.

Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew
did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did
some excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical
Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly
killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it.

I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his
darling imitations, Handing Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever,
which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast
fascinating (for what reason I don't know) of all Kipling's poems,
"On the Road to Mandalay," sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper
& charmed me more than the Deever.

Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all
danced about an hour. There couldn't be a pleasanter night than
that one was. Some of those people complained of fatigue, but I
don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is.

In his reprieve he was like some