d as nearly as might be. His desire
was freedom from care. Also he would have liked a period of quiet and
rest, but that was impossible. He realized that the multitude of honors
tendered him was in a sense a vast compliment which he could not entirely
refuse. Howells writes that Mark Twain's countrymen "kept it up past all
precedent," and in return Mark Twain tried to do his part. "His friends
saw that he was wearing himself out," adds Howells, and certain it is
that he grew thin and pale and had a hacking cough. Once to Richard
Watson Gilder he wrote:

"In bed with a chest cold and other company.

"DEAR GILDER,--I can't. If I were a well man I could explain
with this pencil, but in the cir--ces I will leave it all to
your imagination.

"Was it Grady that killed himself trying to do all the dining
and speeching? No, old man, no, no!

"Ever yours, MARK."

In the various dinner speeches and other utterances made by Mark Twain at
this time, his hearers recognized a new and great seriousness of purpose.
It was not really new, only, perhaps, more emphasized. He still made
them laugh, but he insisted on making them think, too. He preached a new
gospel of patriotism--not the patriotism that means a boisterous cheering
of the Stars and Stripes wherever unfurled, but the patriotism that
proposes to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In
one place he said:

"We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to
take their patriotism at second hand; to shout with the largest
crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter
--exactly as boys under monarchies are taught, and have always been
taught."

He protested against the blind allegiance of monarchies. He was seldom
"with the largest crowd" himself. Writing much of our foreign affairs,
then in a good deal of a muddle, he assailed so fearlessly and fiercely
measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed
knight on a charger and as Huck Finn with a gun.

But he was not always warlike. One of the speeches he made that winter
was with Col. Henry Watterson, a former Confederate soldier, at a Lincoln
birthday memorial at Carnegie Hall. "Think of it!" he wrote Twichell,
"two old rebels functioning there; I as president and Watterson as orator
of the day. Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank
God!"

The Clemens household d