s, 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 in the private dining-room,
where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty
when expanded to its limit. That room and that table have mingled with
much distinguished entertainment, also with history. Henry James made
his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed
it was his first, though this is by the way.

A letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for the
Prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room on
the 5th of January. It was not an invitation, but a gracious privilege.
I was in New York a day or two in advance of the date, and I think David
Munro was the first person I met at The Players. As he greeted me his
eyes were eager with something he knew I would wish to hear. He had been
delegated to propose the dinner to Mark Twain, and had found him propped
up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of the Nast book. I
suspect that Munro had led him to speak of it, and that the result had
lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of h