I think, that I sent him a copy of the book. It did not occur
to me that I should hear of it again.

We step back a moment here. Something more than a year earlier, through
a misunderstanding, Mark Twain's long association with The Players had
been severed. It was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the
club. There was a movement among what is generally known' as the "Round
Table Group"--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at
a large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again. David
Munro, associate editor of the North American Review--"David," a man
well loved of men--and Robert Reid, the painter, prepared this simple
document:

TO
MARK TWAIN
from
THE CLANSMEN

Will ye no come back again?
Will ye no come back again?
Better lo'ed ye canna be,
Will ye no come back again?

It was signed by Munro and by Reid and about thirty others, and it
touched Mark Twain deeply. The lines had always moved him. He wrote:

TO ROBT. REID & THE OTHERS--

WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charlie's
heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine. I shall
be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful
compliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long. I hope
you can poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate.
It will be many months before I can foregather with you, for this
black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the
loss of one whose memory is the only thing I worship.

It is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver
what I feel, anyway. I will put the contents of your envelope in
the small casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to
me.
S. L. C.

So the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return to
social life. At the completion of his seventieth year the club had taken
action, and Mark Twain had been brought back, not in the regular order
of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties. There
was only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving.

The Players, as a club, does not give dinners. Whatever is done in that
way is done by one or more of the members