ovided it
is not too short."

Of course I promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some
little thing addressed to Miss Oakes.

We are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has
been among us for the past fortnight. With regards to Mrs. Clemens
and the children, in which my wife joins,

Yours truly, DEAN SAGE.

It amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but
when he picked up a letter from Brander Matthews, asking, in some absurd
fashion, for his signature, and another from Ellen Terry, and from
Irving, and from Stedman, and from Warner, and Waring, and H. C. Bunner,
and Sarony, and Laurence Hutton, and John Hay, and R. U. Johnson, and
Modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him. He was
delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way,
and most of the letters were distinctly amusing. Some of them asked for
autographs by the yard, some by the pound. Henry Irving said:

I have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o'clock--very
tired--but there will be no rest till I get your autograph.

Some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from The
Innocents Abroad for them or to send an original manuscript. Others
requested that his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size.
John Hay suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young's
"Night Thoughts," and an equal amount of Pollak's "Course of Time."

I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and
it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your
handwriting.

Altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his
admiration for Cable grew accordingly. Cable, too, was pleased with the
success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing
again. A newspaper of the time reports him as saying:

I never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the 1st
of April. I was afraid the letters would reach Mark when he was in
affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying
to make it up to him.
When I visited Mark we used to open our budgets of letters together
at breakfast. We used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph-
hunter. I think the idea came from that. The first person I spoke
to about it was Robert Underwood Johnson, of the Century. My most