has said in his own commendation. And I thought
Mr. Jerome was modest in that. If he had been talking about another
officer of this county, he could have painted the joys and sorrows of
office and his victories in even stronger language than he did.

I voted for Mr. Jerome in those old days, and I should like to vote for
him again if he runs for any office. I moved out of New York, and that
is the reason, I suppose, I cannot vote for him again. There may be some
way, but I have not found it out. But now I am a farmer--a farmer up in
Connecticut, and winning laurels. Those people already speak with such
high favor, admiration, of my farming, and they say that I am the only
man that has ever come to that region who could make two blades of grass
grow where only three grew before.

Well, I cannot vote for him. You see that. As it stands now, I cannot.
I am crippled in that way and to that extent, for I would ever so much
like to do it. I am not a Congress, and I cannot distribute pensions,
and I don't know any other legitimate way to buy a vote. But if I should
think of any legitimate way, I shall make use of it, and then I shall
vote for Mr. Jerome.

HENRY IRVING

The Dramatic and Literary Society of London gave a welcome-home
dinner to Sir Henry Irving at the Savoy Hotel, London, June 9,
1900. In proposing the toast of "The Drama" Mr. Clemens said:

I find my task a very easy one. I have been a dramatist for thirty
years. I have had an ambition in all that time to overdo the work of the
Spaniard who said he left behind him four hundred dramas when he died. I
leave behind me four hundred and fifteen, and am not yet dead.

The greatest of all the arts is to write a drama. It is a most difficult
thing. It requires the highest talent possible and the rarest gifts.
No, there is another talent that ranks with it--for anybody can write a
drama--I had four hundred of them--but to get one accepted requires real
ability. And I have never had that felicity yet.

But human nature is so constructed, we are so persistent, that when we
know that we are born to a thing we do not care what the world thinks
about it. We go on exploiting that talent year after year, as I have
done. I shall go on writing dramas, and some day the impossible may
happen, but I am not looking for it.

In writing plays the chief thing is novelty. The world grows tired of
solid forms in all the arts. I struck a new