Section 30 of Mark Twain of Biography, by Albert Bigelow Payne, Chapter 241, Gorky, Howells, and Mark Twain. Clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-making that had claimed him on his return from England five years before. He made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be called upon for remarks. He fell out of the habit of preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him confidence for his departure from his earlier method. There was seldom an afternoon or evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report of his doings. Once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had become the bell of New York. But he was something further. An editorial in the evening mail said, Mark Twain, in his last and best of life for which the first was made, seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American metropolis, an Aristides for justness and boldness, as well as incessancy of opinion, a Solon for wisdom and cogency, and a Themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of his person. Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. If he gains to make a public appearance, there is a throng at the doors which overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. We must be glad that we have a public commentator like Mark Twain always at hand, and his wit and wisdom continually on tap. His sound, breezy Mississippi Valley Americanism is a corrective to all sorts of snobbery. He cultivates respect for human rights by always making sure that he has his own. He talked one afternoon to the Barnard Girls, and another afternoon to the Women's University Club, illustrating his talk with what purported to be moral tales. He spoke at a dinner given to City Tax Commissioner Mr. Charles Putzel, and when he was introduced there as the man who had said, when in doubt tell the truth, he replied that he had invented that maxim for others, and that, when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity. The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor, but he made them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and searching satire in the body of what he said. It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark Twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center of news. Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals. The incident had begun in November of the previous year. One of the librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the decree, wrote privately of the matter. Clemens had replied, Dear sir, I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience. And to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through, before I was fifteen years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave. Ask that young lady. She will tell you so. Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's character, since you wish it, but really in my opinion it is no better than those of Solomon, David, and the rest of the sacred brotherhood. If there is an unexpurgated in the children's department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom and Huck from that questionable companionship? Sincerely yours, S. L. Clemens. I shall not show your letter to any one. It is safe with me." Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out. It has been supplied to the writer by Mr. Dickinson and is published here with his consent. One of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theatre-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the following march. The tip was sufficient. Telephone bells began to jingle and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark Twain's doorsteps. At 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America but in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and Clemens replied, Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove. The newspaper boys want that letter. Don't you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and I'll take care of this end of the line. In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds, There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion. He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliography, and was perhaps irreverent, but anyone who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck's soul in regard to the betrayal of Jim will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling. The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming, but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist Jankowski as a sort of advance agent for Gorky had already called upon Clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission. He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. Howells, too, was of this opinion. In his account of the episode he says, I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high. Clemens' interest, however, grew. He attended a dinner given to Gorky at the A-Club, number three, Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners. Also he wrote a letter to be read by Jankowski out of meeting held at the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia's wrongs. The letter ran, Dear Mr. Jankowski, my sympathies are with the Russian Revolution, of course. It goes without saying. I hope it will succeed. Now that I have talked with you, I take heart to believe it will. Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones, and its idle and vicious kin, has been born quite long enough in Russia, I should think, and it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it, and set up the Republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when Tsars and Grand Dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven. Most sincerely yours, Mark Twain. Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a literary dinner to be given in his honour. The movement was really assuming considerable proportions when suddenly something happened which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously. Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue one afternoon, I met Howells coming out. I thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. I went up to the study and, on opening the door, I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers pacing up and down rather fiercely. He turned, inquiringly, as I entered. I had clipped a cartoon from a morning paper which pictured him as upsetting the Tsar's throne, the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. I said, Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens. He shook his head violently. No! I can't see anything, now! And in another moment had disappeared into his own room. Something extraordinary had happened. I wondered if, after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled. I was naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. By and by I went down on the street where the news boys were calling extras. When I had bought one and glanced at the first page, I knew. Gorky had been expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife, a woman not so recognized by the American laws. Madame Andreva, a Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected. But it was not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in that way. Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens, and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the dinner. Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreva were evicted from a procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the headlines. An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells. The Russian Revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest. Howells came again, the reporters following and standing guard at the door below. In my Mark Twain he says, That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano, which was every now and then blowing a cone off, as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market and Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people. And we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The Forbidden Butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens. How many, he demanded. Five, the Butler faltered. Reporters, the Butler feigned uncertainty. What would you do, he asked me. I wouldn't see them, I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their veracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky, but the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine humor next morning. It was before dictation time, and he came drifting into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the impossibility of its being given now. Then he said, American public opinion is a delicate fabric. It shrivels like the webs of mourning at the lightest touch. Later in the day he made this memorandum. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty, no matter it will be inflicted just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do. Find out what the country's customs are, and refrain from offending against them. The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them. But I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom. It is built of brass. Boiler iron. Granite. Facts, seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar. To Dan Beard he said, Gorky made an awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here in his shirt-tail. The Gorky disturbance had already begun to subside when there came another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. On the afternoon of the eighteenth of April I heard, at the players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great earthquake was going on in San Francisco. Half an hour later, perhaps, I met Clemens coming out of number twenty-one. He asked, Have you heard the news about San Francisco? I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake, and had seen an extra with big scareheads. But I suppose the matter was exaggerated. No, he said, I am afraid it isn't. We have just had a telephone message that it is even worse than at first reported. A great fire is consuming the city. Come along to the newsstand, and we'll see if there is a later addition. We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, and got some fresh extras. The news was indeed worse than at first reported. San Francisco was going to destruction. Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. He spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in the perishing city. CHAPTER 242 MARK TWAIN'S GOODBYE TO THE PLATFORM It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that Mark Twain gave a farewell lecture at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Some weeks earlier General Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand dollars for a Mark Twain lecture. But Clemens had replied that he was permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience that had to pay to hear him. I always expect to talk, as long as I can get people to listen to me, he said, but I never again expect to charge for it. Later came one of his inspirations, and he wrote, I will lecture for one thousand dollars on one condition, that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton Association. It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices Mark Twain's farewell lecture were published without delay. I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called. Clemens came into the study where I was working. He often wandered in and out, sometimes without word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning things in general. But this time he suddenly chilled me by saying, I'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on the stage and help me. I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect, then he said, I am going to lecture on Fulton, on the story of his achievements.  Now and then, when I seem to get stuck, I'll lean over and pretend to ask you something, and I want you to pretend to prompt me. You don't need to laugh or to pretend to be assisting in the performance any more than just that. Mark Twain will deliver his Farewell Lecture, Carnegie Hall, April 19, 1906, for the benefit of Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Military organization, Old Guard in full dress uniform will be present. Music by Old Guard Band. Tickets and boxes on sale at Carnegie Hall and Waldorf Historia. Seats, a dollar for fifty, one dollar, fifty cents. It was not likely that I should laugh. I had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth. It did not, for the moment, occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment to my immeasurable relief. It was a magnificent occasion, that spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levy of foremost citizens of the Republic. The band played America, as Mark Twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome. Some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in San Francisco forty years before when his fortunes had hung in the balance. Perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it. At all events he did a different thing. He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood. Ben followed his far sical history of Fulton with General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world, retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands. I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think few took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied, I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen minutes. Sometimes I can do it in an hour. There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remote corners. It did not matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers. Merely to see Mark Twain in his old age and in that splendid setting relating them was enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career. End of Chapter 242 Mark Twain's Good-Bye to the Platform. Read by John Greenman. Section 32 of Mark Twain a Biography. Part 1, 1900 to 1907. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain a Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne. Chapter 243. An Investment in Reading. Many of the less important happenings that seem worth remembering now, among them was the sale at the Nast auction of the Mark Twain letters already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant, and even Lincoln items were sold. But the Mark Twain letters led the list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens Nast letters brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief. It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he heard of it, said, I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this country. But it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes to letter writing, he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That forty-three dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars, after I'm dead. The perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the Secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see a great many of what might be called the milder type of person, who were evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these there came, one day, a very gentle spoken woman, who had promised that she would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she might sit face to face with a great man. It was in the morning hour before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his beautiful dressing-robe, and propped against his pillows. She kept her contract to the letter. But when she rose to go, she said, in a voice of deepest reverence, May I kiss your hand? It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous. Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small, exquisite hand it was, with a gentle dignity and poise of a king, and she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as she went, she said, How God must love you! I hope so! he said softly, and he did not even smile. But after she had gone he could not help saying in a quaint, half-pathetic voice, I guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations. Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous mornings, he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was, the king of a realm without national boundaries. Some of those nearest to him fell naturally into the habit of referring to him as the king, and in time the title crept out of the immediate household, and was taken up by others who loved him. He had been more than once photographed in his bed, but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time with little chance to study his natural attitudes. I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I obtained his permission to let me photograph him, a permission he seldom denied to any one. We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. He was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives. I was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done. I think he expected very little from this amateur performance, but by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than I had hoped for. When I brought him the prince a few days later, he expressed pleasure, and asked, Why didn't you take more? Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction. It being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by Saroni, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since. Saroni was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when Ducilu brought over the first gorilla, he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. I said it was, and Saroni was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete. So he borrowed my overcoat, and put it on the gorilla, and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine. It turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine, but it's not my favorite. I have tried to get it suppressed. Mark Twain made his first investment in Reading that spring. I had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. I was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain and the beauty and the solubility of this situation. His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that I buy it for him, and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost. I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home, but he foresaw that such a site at no great distance from New York would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means. The purchase was made without difficulty, a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently, still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a home. He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. He craved the retirement of solitude, one not too far from the maelstrom, so that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. The country home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was already in the air. No one of the family had at this time seen the location. CHAPTER 244 Trates and Philosophies I brought to the dictation one morning the Omer Kayam card which Twitchell had written him so long ago. I had found it among the letters. It furnished him a subject for that morning. He said, How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omer Kayam. When that card arrived, I had already read the dozen quatrains or so in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of delight, which they occasioned. No poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. It is the only poem I have ever carried about with me. It has not been from, under my hand, all these years. He had no general fondness for poetry, but many poems appeal to him, and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. Once, during the dictation, some verses were sent up by a young authorus who was waiting below for his verdict. The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony. He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then, and said, Tell her she can read it. She has my permission. She may commit any crime she wishes in my name. It was urged that the verses were of High Merit and the author a very charming young lady. I am very glad, he said, and I am glad the Lord made her. I hope he will make some more just like her. I don't always approve of his handiwork, but in this case I do. Then suddenly he added, Well, let me see it. No time like the present to get rid of these things. He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine verses as I believe could not be improved upon. We were held breathless by his dramatic fervor and power. He returned a message to that young aspirant that must have made her heart sing. When the dictation had ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift. Yes, he said, It is a gift, I suppose, like spelling and punctuation and smoking. I seem to have inherited all those. Continuing he spoke of inherited traits in general. There was Page, he said, an ignorant man who could not make a machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one. But he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the world has ever known. He watched over the expert draftsmen and superintended the building of that marvel. Pratt and Whitney built it. But it was Page's machine, nevertheless, the child of his marvellous gift. We don't create any of our traits. We inherit all of them. They have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. Man is the last expression and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world. In these cases we can see that the several temperaments constitute a law of God, a command of God, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to that law is blameless. Man in his evolution inherited the whole sum of these numerous traits, and with each trait it's share of the law of God. He widely differs from them in this, that he possesses not a single characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. You can say the house fly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe the whole house fly tribe. You can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid, and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe. You can say the spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you describe the whole spider and tiger tribes. You can say the lamb is limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you describe all the lambs. There is hardly a creature that you cannot definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait, except man.  These things are all in him somewhere, and they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment. We describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him, or by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him, and accord him high merit for their possession. It is comical. He did not invent these things. He did not stock himself with them. God conferred them upon him in the first instant of creation. They constitute the law, and he could not escape obedience to the decree any more than Page could have built the typesetter he invented, or the Pratt and Whitney machinists could have invented the machine which they built. He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his words were slowly measured with varying pauses between them. He halted in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added, what an amusing creature the human being is. It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and personality of such talks as this, the delicacies of his speech and manner which carried an ineffable charm. It was difficult, indeed, to record the substance. I did not know shorthand, and I should not have taken notes at such times in any case. But I had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of phonographic faculty, though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections, or I would find among his papers, memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts, where he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them verbally. In these cases I have not hesitated to amend my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always lacking, and must be, the wonder of his personality. A number of dictations of this period were about Susie, her childhood, and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his chapters. More than once after such dictations he reproached himself bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. He consoled himself a little by saying that Susie had died at the right time in the flower of youth and happiness. But he blamed himself for the lack of those things which might have made her childhood still more bright. Once he spoke of the biography she had begun and added, Oh! I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl's work. If I had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her, and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me told in her own way year after year. If I had shown her that I cared, she might have gone on with it. We are always too busy for our children. We never give them the time nor the interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them. But the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly and throw it away on those who care for it so little. Then after a moment of silence, But we are repaid for it at last. There comes a time when we want their company and their interest. We want it more than anything in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago. There is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. There's is the praise we want, and the praise we are least likely to get. His moods of remorse seem to overwhelm him at times. He spoke of Henry's death and little Langdon's, and charged himself with both. He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens' life with privations, that the sorrow of Susie's death had hastened her own end. How darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy. But such moods were evanescent.  One morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how he had made a failure of storytelling at a party the night before. An artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most amusing thing in the world, but he had not been satisfied with it, and had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when he had concluded and expected applause only a sickening silence had followed. A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine, he said, And it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed an hour and a half. Then a lady said with evident feeling, Lord, how pathetic! For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains of my great deeps were broken up, and I reigned laughter for forty days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. By that time I realized it was my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos in order to magnify the humorous explosion at the end, but I had constructed such a fog of pathos that when I got to the humor you couldn't find it. He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps he did not think worthwhile to include in his dictations, and sometimes he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside or to outline some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested. Once when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start the back number which was to contain reprints of exciting events from history, newspaper gleanings, eyewitness narrations, which he said never lost their freshness of interest. He suddenly interrupted himself to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future, he to be its publisher and I its editor. I think I assented and the dictation proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently. He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom could find the one most needed. Once after a feverishly impatient search for a few moments he invited Miss Hobby to leave the room temporarily so, as he said, that he might swear. He got up and began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment. It was an enormously large bed and he began to disparage the size of it. One could lose a DOG in this bed, he declared. Finally I suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his hand. He did so and it proved to be the one he wanted. Its discovery was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to volume. Then he said, There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that. A moment later when Miss Hobby returned he was serene and happy again. He was usually gentle during the dictations and patient with those around him, remarkably so, I thought, as a rule. But there were moments that involved risk. He had requested me to interrupt his dictation at any time that I found him repeating or contradicting himself or mistating some fact known to me. At first I hesitated to do this and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. Then he was likely to say, Why didn't you stop me?  So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning and nearly always stopped him at the time. But if it happened that I upset his thought, the thunderbolt was apt to fly. He would say, Now you've knocked everything out of my head. Then of course I would apologize and say I was sorry, which would rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. I became lightning-proof at last. Also I learned better to select the psychological moment for the correction. There was a humorous complexion to the dictations, which perhaps I have not conveyed to the reader at all. Humor was his natural breath and life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals. But poetry was there as well. His presence was full of it. The grandeur of his figure, the grace of his movement, the music of his measured speech. Sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. At such times he had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing gown around his wrist, regarding it intensely as it seemed. His hands were so fair and shapely, the palms and fingertips as pink as those of a child. Then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great white mane, his eyes half closed, yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his clenched fist lifted, or his index finger pointing, to give force and meaning to his words. I cannot recall the picture too often or remind myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and to hear him. I do not know why I have not said before that he smoked continually during these dictations, probably as an aid to thought, though he smoked at most other times for that matter. His cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco. But I had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one. They were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training in the printing office and on the river that had seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. Rich, admiring friends used to send him quantities of expensive imported cigars, but he seldom touched them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. Once, to a minister, he proposed to send him something very special. He wrote, I should accept your hospitable offer at once, but for the fact that I couldn't do it and remain honest. That is to say, if I allowed you to send me what you believed to be good cigars, it would distinctly mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do nothing of the kind. I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had sixty years' experience. No, that is not what I mean. I mean I know a bad cigar better than anybody else. I judge by the price only. If it costs above five cents, I know it to be either foreign or half foreign and unsmokable by me. I have many boxes of Havana cigars of all prices, from twenty cents apiece up to a dollar sixty-six apiece. I bought none of them. They were all presents. They are an accumulation of several years. I have never smoked one of them and never shall. I work them off on the visitor. You shall have a chance. When you come, he smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent, and once, when he had bought a new expensive English briar route, he regarded it doubtfully for a time and then handed it over to me, saying, I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me. I am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild. One day after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man was downstairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey de Pew was to resign his senatorial seat, and Mark Twain was to be nominated in his place. The fancy of this appealed to him, and the reporter was allowed to come up. He was a young man and seemed rather nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. His chief anxiety was apparently to have Mark Twain's comment on the matter. Clemens said very little at the time, he did not wish to be a senator, he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't think he would care for the job anyway. When the reporter was gone, however, certain humorous possibilities developed. The senatorship would be a stepping stone to the presidency, and with the combination of humorist, socialist, and peace patriot in the presidential chair, the nation could expect an interesting time. Nothing further came of the matter. There was no such report. The young newspaper man had invented the whole idea to get a story out of Mark Twain. The item, as printed next day, invited a good deal of comment, and Collier's weekly made it a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the place. If it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came. Sometimes he walked up Fifth Avenue, and I must admit that for a good while I could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness. For most people turned to look, though I was fully aware that I did not in the least come into their scope of vision. They saw only Mark Twain. The feeling was a more comfortable one at the players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. We sat at the round table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him. Once we went to the Music Master, that tender play of Charles Clines, given by that matchless interpreter David Wallfield, Clemens was fascinated and said more than once, It is as permanent as Rip Van Winkle.  We went behind when it was over, and I could see that Warfield glowed with Mark Twain's unstinted approval. Later when I saw him at the players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so happy. There were some billiard games going on between the champions, Hoppy and Sutton, at the Madison Square Garden, and Clemens, with his eager fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. He did not like to go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him. Just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause. The players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot had been made. Then they caught the figure of Mark Twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction. The audience applauded again and waved their handkerchiefs. Such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen. Clemens had a great admiration for the young champion Hoppy, which the billiardists' extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his game with intense eagerness. When it was over the referee said a few words and invited Mark Twain to speak. He rose and told them a story, probably invented on the instant.  The proprietor, who was a red-haired man with such hair as I have never seen anywhere except on a torch, asked me if I would like to play.  So I knocked them around and thought I was doing pretty well, when he said, That's all right, I'll play you left-handed. It hurt my pride, but I played him. We banked for the shot, and he won it. Then he commenced to play, and I commenced to chalk my cue to get ready to play. And he went on playing, and I went on chalking my cue, and he played, and I chalked all through that game. When he had run his string out, I said, That's wonderful, perfectly wonderful. If you can play that way left-handed, what could you do right-handed? Couldn't do anything, he said. I'm a left-handed man. How it delighted them. I think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season. A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire for the summer, this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a year before, the Copley Green Place being now occupied by its owner. End of Chapter 245, In the Days Round, read by John Greenman. CHAPTER 246 THE SECOND SUMMER AT DOUBLIN The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beach forest some two or three miles from Dublin just under Menadoc, a good way up the slope. It is a handsome, roomy frame-house and had a long, colonnaded veranda of overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet, lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains. All the handy work of God is there. I had seen these things in paintings, but had not dreamed that such a view really existed. The immediate foreground was a grassy slope with ancient blooming apple trees, and just at the right hand Menadoc rose superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever-deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end. It was a masterpiece of the greater mind and of the highest order perhaps, where it had in it nothing of the touch of man. A church-spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field or stone wall or cultivated land. It was lonely. It was unfriendly. It cared nothing whatever for humankind. It was as if God, after creating all the world, had wrought his master-work here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that he had forgotten to give it a soul. In a sense this was true, for he had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men. It lacked the human touch, the human interest, and I could never quite believe in its reality. The time of arrival heightened this first impression. It was mid-May, and the lilacs were prodigal in bloom, but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. It seemed a spectral place, a place of supernatural beauty. Warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. I believe Jean Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. Something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods. She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. She had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain side and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion. Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all. She was not yet strong, and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician's care. Ms. Hobby came, and on the twenty-first of May the dictations were resumed. We began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing. The absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. The feeling of the old luxury and richness was there. It was a summer furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery. I think I shall like it, he said, when I get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labelled, and I think we'll do our dictating out here, hereafter. It ought to be an inspiring place." So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background. During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon. When it stormed, we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blaze and logs, and at the other the orchestral, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. Sometimes when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world, a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. When the dictation finished early there would be music, the music that he loved most, Beethoven's symphonies, or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin. Schubert opus 142, number 2, Chopin opus 37, number 2. It is easy to understand that this carried one a removed father from the customary things of life. It was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. In my notes made from day to day I find that I have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy. I had lodgings in the village and drove out mornings for the dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons, for he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. There was a woods path to the Upton Place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. A part of the way was through such a growth of beach timber as I have never seen elsewhere, tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through. One found it easy to expect there story-book ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white paltries. Then came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume, and this led to a dim religious place, a natural cathedral, where the columns were stately pine trees, branching and meeting at the top, a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play. You crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees. The days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except as the summer deepened the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountainside. He sat more often now in a large rocking chair, and generally seemed to be looking through half-dosed lids toward the monadnock heights that were always changing in aspect, in color and in form, as clouds shapes drifted by or gathered in those lofty hollows. White and yellow butterflies hovered over the grass, and there were some curious large black ants, the largest I have ever seen and quite harmless, that would slip in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us. Now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies. On June 1 I find in my notebook this entry. Warm and pleasant, the dictation about Grant continues, a great privilege to hear this foremost man of letters review his associations with that foremost man of arms.  He wears his worn Morocco slippers with black hose, sits in the rocker, smoking and looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. He is speaking just now of a Grant dinner which he attended, where Depew spoke. One is impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to the war-torn veteran of a thousand dinners, the honored guest of many, an honored figure of all. Earlier when he had been chastising some old offender, he added, however, he's dead, and I forgive him. Then after a moment's reflection, no, strike that last sentence out. When we laughed, he added, we can't forgive him yet. A few days later, it was June 4, the day before the second anniversary of the death of Mrs. Clemens, we found him at first in excellent humor from the long dictation of the day before. Then his mind reverted to the tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. It was hard work. He walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost nothing. He gave it up at last, remarking, We will not work, to-morrow. So we went away. He did not dictate on the fifth or the sixth, but on the seventh he resumed the story of Mrs. Clemens' last days at Florence. The weather had changed, the sunlight and warmth had all gone, a chill penetrating mist was on the mountains, Menadnok was blotted out. We expected him to go to the fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in his mind. A black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders, which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. For two hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life of the woman he had loved. It is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation Clemens did very little literary work during these months. He had brought his manuscript trunk, as usual, thinking perhaps to finish the microbe story and other of the uncompleted things, but the dictation gave him sufficient mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his stock-and-trade, as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into autobiography. Among these were the notes of his trip down the Rhone, made in 1891, and the old Stormfield story, which he had been treasuring and suppressing so long. He wrote Howells in June, The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. With intervals I find that I've been at it, off and on, nearly two hours for one hundred and fifty-five days since January 9th. To be exact, I've dictated seventy-five hours in eighty days and loafed seventy-five days. I've added sixty thousand words in the month that I've been here, which indicates that I've dictated during twenty days of that time, forty hours at an average of one thousand five hundred words an hour. It's a plenty, and I'm satisfied. There's a good deal of fat I've dictated from January 9th, two hundred and ten thousand words, and the fat adds about fifty thousand more. The fat is old pigeon-holed things of the years gone by, which I, or editors, didn't dast to print. For instance, I am dumping in the little old book which I read to you in Hartford about thirty years ago, and which you said, publish, and ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction. He'll do it, Captain Stormfield's visit to heaven. It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't to see print until I am dead. Tomorrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns, burned alive if they venture to print it, this side of A.D. 2006, which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters if I live three or four years longer. The edition, A.D. 2006, will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around, taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited. The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was naturally one of religious heresies, a violent attack on the orthodox scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the constellations. Mark Twain once expressed himself concerning reverence and the lack of it. I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one person or another is always charging me with lack of reverence. Reverence for what? For whom? Who is to decide what ought to command my reverence? My neighbor or I? I think I ought to do the electing myself. The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed. It is his privilege. The Christian doesn't. Apparently that is his privilege. The account is square enough. They haven't any right to complain of the other. Yet they do complain of each other. And that is where the unfairness comes in. Each says that the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken. For manifestly you can't have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. If you could do that, you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles, and get a reputation. He was not reading many books at this time. He was inclined rather to be lazy, as he said, and to loathe during the afternoons. But I remember that he read aloud, after the wedding, and the mother, those two beautiful word-pictures by Howells, which he declared sounded the depths of humanity with a deep sea lead. Also he read a book by William Allen White, in Our Town, a collection of tales that he found most admirable. I think he took the trouble to send White a personal handwritten letter concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as he said, to loathe the use of the pen. There were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did not often leave the house. Once at least he assisted in an afternoon entertainment at the Dublin Club, where he introduced his invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its demonstration by George de Forest Brush and Joseph Lindon Smith, to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. The art consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes, and a set formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject. Twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades, and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the Hartford days. Sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk, but these things were seldom. Now and then during the summer he made a trip to New York of a semi-business nature, partly going by the way of Fairhaven, where he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in Mr. Rogers' yacht. Once they made a cruise of considerable length to Bar Harbor and elsewhere. Here is an amusing letter which he wrote to Mrs. Rogers after such a visit. Dear Mrs. Rogers, in packing my things in your house yesterday morning, I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around. I thinking about theology, and not noticing the way this family does in similar circumstances like these. Two books, Mr. Rogers' Brown Slippers, and a ham. I thought it was iron. It looks like one we used to have. I am very sorry it happened, but it shan't occur again, and don't you worry. He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb, and I will send some of the things back, anyway, if there is some that won't keep. In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In one of his dictations he said, The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine. Menadnok is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green. The lakes as intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remotor one than we have known before. For beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture, rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes. But there is a defect, only one, but it is a defect which almost entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor. He lives within two miles of us except Franklin McVeigh, and he is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe. I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am existing, broken-hearted, in a garden of Eden. The garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change. Anything for society. I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it, a compact and visible allegory of it, furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone on this veranda in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as brick-a-brack. Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me. This was no more than a mood, though real enough while it lasted, somber and, in its way, regal. It was the loneliness of a king, King Lear, yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence. It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda where his figure had become so familiar. He had determined to have his hair cut when he reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this happened. When the proofs came, seven of them, he arranged them as a series to illustrate what he called the progress of a moral purpose. He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each photograph numbering them from one to seven, laying each set in a sheet of letter paper which formed a sort of wrapper on which was written. This series of seven photographs registers with scientific precision, stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the mind of the human race's oldest friend, S. L. C. He added a personal inscription and sent one to each of his more intimate friends. One of the pictures amused him more than the others, because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into it and paused near his foot. He had never outgrown his love for cats, and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a neighbour. He didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay sufficiently to ensure their subsequent care. These kittens he called sackcloth and ashes, ashes being the joint name of the two that looked exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. Their gambles always amused him, he would stop any time in the midst of dictation to enjoy them. Once, as he was about to enter the screen door that led into the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting. With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow and stepped back and said, Walk in, gentlemen, I always give precedence to royalty. And the kittens marched in, tails in air. All summer long they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and butterflies down the clover slope. It was a never-ending amusement to him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it, and tumble back and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of disappointment and disgust. I remember once when he was walking up and down discussing some very serious subject and one of the kittens was lying on the veranda asleep. A butterfly came drifting along, three feet or so above the floor. The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect out of the corner of its eye and perhaps did not altogether realize its action. At all events it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. Then it sprang to its feet and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away. Plemons had seen the performance and it completely took his subject out of his mind. He laughed extravagantly and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies. In that remote solitude there was one important advantage. There was no procession of human beings with axes to grind and few curious callers. Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened to seldom to annoy him. Even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission an appointment. Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough. When the British Premier, Campbell Bannerman, celebrated his 70th birthday, the London Tribune and the New York Herald requested a tribute. He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very old friend. He had known him first at Marienbad in 91 and in Vienna in 98, in daily intercourse when they had lived at the same hotel. His tribute ran to his Excellency the British Premier. Congratulations, not condolences! Before 70 we are merely respected at best and we have to behave all the time or we lose that asset. But after 70 we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered and don't have to behave unless we want to. When I first knew you, honoured sir, one of us was hardly even respected. Mark Dwayne. He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it. Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. One day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household. He was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations. After reading them aloud with great effect, to tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy. But his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion and a little later he incorporated one of the Jenny Allen letters in a speech which he made at a press club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified spelling, offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas. The letters in the end proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form. Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. He even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher and wrote to Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents, Dear Miss Stockbridge, if she really exists, 257 Benefit Street, if there is any such place. Yes, I should like a copy of that other letter.  But never mind, it isn't any matter. Now, as to publication, he set forth his views and promised his assistants when enough of the letters should be completed. Clemens allowed his name to be included with a list of spelling reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or writing. His interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its favor. His own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all so that each letter or character should have one sound and one sound only, and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand. He wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. Once he said, Our alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any large word in the English language with any degree of certainty. Its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. English orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as much. He would naturally favor simplicity in anything. I remember him reading as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, and his verdict, that is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English and written when we had no vocabulary. A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap. It is indeed. Still, I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles as if looking about him for the precise term. He would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. Mark Twain's English always focused exactly. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain A Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne Chapter 248 What Is Man? and The Autobiography Clemens decided to publish, anonymously, or rather to print privately, The Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before, and added to from time to time. He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the Devon Press was engaged to do the work. The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the superintendent of the Devon Company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on handmade paper to be gradually distributed to intimate friends. In an introductory word, dated February 1905, the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. He probably referred to the Monday Evening Club essay What Is Happiness, February 1883, C. Chapter 141. A number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. It was not over-favorably received. It was generally characterized as a clever and even brilliant expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. The supremacy of self-interest and man, the irresponsible machine, are the main features of What Is Man, and both of these, and all the rest, are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life sequence which began with the first created spark. There can be no training of the ideals, upward and still upward, no selfishness and unsophishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion, once admitting the postulate that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree.  Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to surround everything like the sky, he answered, yes, like the sky, you can't break through anywhere. Colonel Harvey came to double in that summer and persuaded Clemens to let him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the North American review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. The matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well as in that long deferred period for which it was planned. Colonel Harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out. It may be said that most of the chapters were delightful enough, though, had it been possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications might have been avoided. It does not matter now, and it was not a matter of very wide import then. The payment of these chapters netted Clemens thirty thousand dollars, a comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the property at Redding. He engaged John Mead Howells to prepare some preliminary plans. Clara Clemens at Norfolk was written to of the matter. A little later I joined her in Redding, and she was the first of the family to see that beautiful hilltop. She was well pleased with the situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand. Clemens wrote Howells that he proposed to call it Autobiography House, as it was to be built out of the review money. And he said, If you will build on my farm and live there, it will set Mrs. Howells' health up for sure. Come, and I'll sell you the site for twenty-five dollars. John will tell you it is a choice place. The unusual summer was near its close. In my notebook under date of September 16 appears this entry. Windy in valleys, but not cold. This veranda is protected. It is peaceful here and perfect. But we are at the summer's end. This is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days later. I do not remember the date of the return to New York, and apparently I made no record of it. But I do not think it could have been later than the twentieth. It had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvellous summer, such as I would hardly know again. When I think of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless, slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech, always deliberate, save at rare intervals, always impressive, whatever the subject might be, whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of humankind.


Hello and welcome back to yet another GCSE revision lesson now guys I want to begin by thanking all of you who keep on showing me so much love on YouTube also Adding suggestions and comments and feedback on what you guys would like to see in English GCSE revision lessons Okay, the reason why I created this YouTube channel is literally to serve you guys Okay, so I absolutely love hearing your feedback and of course part of your feedback was to do with language paper 2 Question number five. This is where you're asked a topical issue You're asked to show your opinion and to debate, you know, whatever topical issue be it for example social media animal quality Whatever and lots of you on YouTube in the comments have basically suggested that, you know, Barbara It'll be really useful with some of these common topical issues to have an idea if one of these topics came up What could I write about? Okay, so today's lesson is a Continuation of last week's lesson where I'm going to present you guys with three more topical issues three really popular Topical issues that should they come up? You can use these ideas and these plans in your response Okay Now the main topical issues that I want to go over today, which are very very popular Especially with a qa are the subject of animals animal welfare animal cruelty anything to do with animals Right how we treat them. That's a very popular question. Okay, however Another topical issue and by the way when I talk about topical issues is stuff that you generally hear about in the news on the radio Society kind of debating. Okay, so of course animal cruelty is one of those topical issues The other is to do with education, especially during the summer. Okay when the summer exams are out There's always some form of debate Our GCSE is worth the paper. They're printed on is education all about just going to school or is education a bit broader than that? Okay, so of course, that's another topical area that you need to have some kind of opinion on okay And the other topical area is to do with the environment Slash climate change. So what I'm going to do is go over Plans that you can use including some made-up anecdotes examples of statistics when you are arguing and discussing some of these issues So let's begin with the topic of animals animal welfare animal cruelty now One of the popular topical areas when it comes to thinking about animal welfare is our zoos Humane are they good is even pet keeping good? Is it good for us to eat meat? Okay? So let's go over an essay plan and a debate that you can use which you can kind of Apply to either of these issues. Okay, so this debate is to do with animal welfare You know, is it good to have zoos? Is it good to even have pets? And of course what I'm going to show you guys is also some examples that you can use right? So my main argument which I'm going to make the argument for is the idea that you know Zoos are really bad having pets is really bad, but even keeping animals on farms and stuff. That's all bad Okay, that's going to be my main argument and of course I then need to balance the discussion remember with question number five for language paper to you always need to Balance your discussion to show that you have an awareness that other people have Opposing opinions and you need to show that you've considered those okay So of course in my two opposing points, I'm also going to show why people might disagree with me Okay Now the first point you can make especially when it comes to animal welfare is the notion that zoos are really really bad Okay, they are prisons for animals and you could state and this is a made-up statistic Okay, you can say that our SPCA actually found that zoos which kind of keep you know Wild animals like lions leopards and so on they actually cause these animals which are outside of the natural Inhabitats and the natural environments real Depression okay, so I'm going to make the argument that you know according to RSPC in a recent study They found that 90% of zoo animals are suffering from some kind of depression because they are taken out of the natural habitat Okay, that could be the first discussion you can make and then the second point is to do with pet keeping Okay, so of course, this is not my personal opinions I usually just select the side of the argument and have more to talk about and can be a little bit interesting and Controversial, okay? Now the second thing you could argue is to do with pet keeping you could argue that actually keeping pets is also unnatural and inhumane animals need to run free they need to run wild Okay, and pet keeping is inhumane and here you can give lots of examples of different forms of pets that we see people keeping In their homes right dogs cats rabbits hamsters and so on and you can make the argument They're actually it's a form of animal cruelty taking these animals and you know For example, neutering them and controlling their movements with doing within your home And then the third argument that you can make when it comes to any question to do with animal quality or animal welfare Is the idea that even meat eating and you know farms that you know keep animals like cows and so on are Evil, okay, so they you know overbreed these animals and they engage in quite evil practices And also by extension it's really evil for us to consume meat Okay, and here you can talk about how you know animals being evil you can use the anecdote of farmer Sally Smith But previously used to keep a farm of cows But then found that you know the way they would be treated in the industry was inhumane So she decided as a farmer to completely change to sell all of her animals and instead change into Creating her farm or using her farm to you know, produce more vegetables which are even better for us to consume Okay, those are the three points you could use for any animal welfare question animal welfare animal quality zoos Are they good pet keeping is it bad? Okay, of course the counterpoints could be for example number one Actually keeping pets is humane and you know animals, especially pets like domesticated pets Can't actually survive in the wild and here you can maybe even talk about and make the extension in an anecdote that John Doe actually rescued a monkey right and he rescued it from the wild and it would have otherwise died had he not Rescued it and kept it as a pet. That's the first counter argument The second counter argument can be that zoos are also really important because they have played the significant part in saving endangered animals And this is a totally made up statistic Oxford University found that 80% of pandas are in zoos Okay, and of course they have they're no longer endangered because of the role that zoos play That's the points that you could raise if you get an animal related question a question related to animal cruelty or animal welfare Let's have a look at education yet another really popular topical area that you should anticipate and have some kind of opinion on For language paper to question number five. So of course the question around education tends to be this notion of you know Is education worth it? Is it worth, you know, the paper that it's printed on and I'm going to make the argument that it's not worth it classroom education GCSEs are actually not that important They don't teach us real life skills and of course the counterpoints will be actually, you know Your life is all about education and if you don't have, you know, great GCSEs and so on then your life will come to nothing Okay, that's going to be my counter arguments However, if you get an education related question The first point you can make if you decided to go with my line of argument could be that, you know GCSEs are absolutely not worth the paper they're printed on and you can make up the statistic that gov.uk the UK government bodies Website found that 75% of students year 11's who have attained GCSEs have learned classroom knowledge But they don't actually know how to function in the real world because they have not been taught emotional intelligence as part of their School qualification you can make the argument that GCSEs actually don't teach us the ability to function with other people in society Okay, and they don't even teach us emotional intelligence. That's the first argument against, you know Education and school is it worth it? Is it not? Okay? I'm saying that it's not worth it It's better to just go out into the world and get your education via working with other people in the world world second reason could be Well second argument could be that learning in the real world is better than in the classroom And here you can make up an anecdote that, you know, Sanny Smith, especially when it comes to things like languages, right? GCSE in French, for instance, is far less valuable than actually going to France, going to somewhere like Nice or Paris and then, you know Learning the language from local people and from even getting like a local job, whatever, right? And the anecdote to make up example is Sanny Smith who's in year 11 who learned more from four weeks away during her summer holidays After year 10, she learned more French when she went to Nice and she studied the language and worked and got a part-time job in Nice Than two years that she spent getting her French GCSEs in a classroom. That's the second reason why education You know, it's not worth the paper that's printed on and then the third reason if you're arguing in this way Is to do with how education actually doesn't give you work experience, right? Learning the classroom doesn't actually put you out into the world, you're not getting actual work experience and Things like, you know, going and getting part-time job and even doing things like the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Actually teaches you more than the classroom and here you can use some examples of different ways that, you know Outside of traditional education people learn and are even more valuable to society For example getting part-time jobs joining group sports being part of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards and even getting work experience So using some examples That's the arguments for why education is not really that important It's not even worth the paper that it's printed on. However, of course, you need to balance that and to talk about how for example Number one counter arguments actually most jobs, especially most high-paying jobs require a GCSE the require formal qualifications and John Doe, so this is my made-up anecdote He found his life has been incredibly hard after leaving school with no GCSEs All the jobs that he's tried to apply for have not accepted him because he doesn't have any basic qualifications Therefore education and formal schooling is still really important in the real world. And then a second counter argument could be That actually Schools and GCSEs form the foundation for our intelligence. Okay, it's hard to develop other things like emotional intelligence It's hard to even know how to work with other people if you don't actually learn it first in the classroom Okay, and the made-up statistic you can use is Cambridge University found that GCSEs boost our IQs by 80 percent Okay, so that's the line of argument you can take if you've got an education related question where you know Is it worth it? Is it not and so on the third topic area is to do with the environment slash climate change One very very popular debate is our cars bad for the environment our planes any form of vehicle or Transportation are they good? Are they bad? Should they be banned? Okay, and the argument I'm going to make is actually Cars vehicles in general and to be honest you can even substitute my reference to cars here with planes and so on Okay, actually they are still really important and they're not actually that bad for the environment Especially because there's been so much changes made today to cars planes and so on that make them actually environmentally friendly and of course I'm going to show you the counter arguments which you can make if you're arguing against, you know cars planes and so on Okay, so when it comes to environment climate change the first point I would make is it would be wrong to ban cars Slash planes, okay, and I'm going to talk about mainly cars here Okay, so most cars today are very environmentally friendly they are non-polluting and I'm going to use some examples in my first argument And I'll point to you know Tesla's Toyota Priuses BMWs and Mercedes They all have electrical cars which give off very minimal pollution So it would be a mistake to ban things like cars And of course, hey you can even substitute this for planes and you can talk about you know British Airways fleet Ryanair fleet whatever which are you know, they've started reducing the carbon emissions Okay, that's the first argument the second which is for the idea that we should not ban cars We shouldn't see you know these different types of vehicles as bad for the environment is cars have saved vulnerable people and of course it makes us all far more efficient, okay And of course if you ban a car what would happen to people who are disabled who can't get easily to and from place by just using trains If you were to ban for example cars, you know people who are traveling at night, right? So people who maybe work in late shifts at McDonald's for example in late hospital shifts actually they could be very vulnerable Okay, and here I'll make up an anecdote Sally Smith who's got an evening job working a night shift in McDonald's Okay, that's a part-time job What she's still going to school. She actually or rather she's in sixth form. Okay, because in school you can't drive She actually needs her car and it can't be banned because she would be very vulnerable and very exposed going home Okay, that could be the second reason why it's not going to ban cars Or you know, you can talk about any other vehicle and then the third reason why for example If you're to make the argument, especially kind of climate change related that you know We shouldn't ban cars planes all of that is road and air standards have become really really high Okay, so for example in London, you've got something called like the you less zone the ultra low emission zone There's been so many laws and stuff put in place that means that cars which you know Have way too much pollution or even planes that give off way too much pollution are banned And so most car owners today and even most planes actually don't give off that many emissions because they don't want to get Fine. Okay, so the road and air standards are so high and there's so many rules that vehicles today get fine Which means that you know vehicles planes and stuff like that actually now Environmentally friendly, okay And here I'll make up a statistic and say gov. UK found that 80% of UK cars have close to zero So two emissions, okay, but of course if you're arguing in this line You then need to show counter arguments and why people would disagree with you why people would say no We need to get rid of cars. We need to get rid of planes and so on Okay, and the first counter argument could be that people use continue to use vehicles for very short distances Okay, yes It's one thing you know to say that cars for example really good for vulnerable people But actually majority of people don't need the cars that they have and actually they even use the cars and these different types of Vehicles very pointlessly, okay, and I'll make up an anecdote here and say that John Doe's neighbor Uses his car to travel five minutes to the gym rather than just walking there Okay, so of course this is illustrating that actually most people who own cars should not be allowed to own them because they use them needlessly, okay, and this contributes to like sound pollution and so on Then the second counter argument as to why it's important to still ban cars slash planes could be that most fatal accidents are vehicle and even plane related and Here again and made up statistic could be that Oxford University found that 68% of deaths in the UK were caused by some Kind of vehicle, okay? So as I said when it comes to preparing for language paper to question number five in in your GCSEs It's actually quite easy to prepare for this as long as you understand the major kind of subject areas and then have Some kind of opinion on it. Okay, remember that This part of the paper tends to test your awareness of topical issues therefore literally list out all the major topical issues and then if they were to come up have quick plans and Quick ideas of okay if I had an animal welfare question I already know what I talk about if it was an education relations question I know what I talk about of course if it's also now climate change environment I kind of know what I'll talk about. Okay, so I hope this helped and thank you so much guys for your feedback Please of course, let me know what else you'd like to see on this channel


Tourism officials anticipate improved arrivals in the next quarter after the nationwide lockdown in Britain, a major source market of St Lucia. This and other challenges to the sector at the start of the new year has had a significant impact on the momentum built in December 2020. The issues were discussed at a press conference hosted by the St Lucia tourism authority, St Lucia is adjusting its approach to marketing the destination as pandemic disruptions in source markets continue into the new year. Britain enters another country-wide lockdown to combat the fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus. Tourism Minister Hon. Dominic Fede says measures have been instituted in hopes of maintaining the sector. We have been using innovative marketing techniques to see how best we can encourage individuals to be able to come to our shores in the numbers that would make it sustainable for our hotels to remain open and for the airlines to keep flying. We do anticipate that a number of the airlines are going to pull back and scale back in terms of the capacity and that will no doubt affect arrivals. Fede also acknowledges the fuelled outbreaks in the United States posing a major challenge to the sector as well. There is a prevailing increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and the number of hospitalizations as well as the stress on the healthcare sector within the United States is also going to pose significant challenges on the ability of people to be able to travel. The new development now we're seeing is that a number of states are already requiring people to test on the way back and that did not happen in the earlier stages of our reopening. But this is going to pose a new challenge. It is going to no doubt be an impediment for people to be able to travel. The expected dip in arrivals due to further pandemic disruptions will break the momentum set in December 2020 which peaked at 10,000. While this represents 25% of figures recorded for that period in the previous year, it was a high performance under pandemic conditions. I think that a lot of hotels had a very good last week of the year. Boxing their arrivals registered over a thousand people, which really went back close to the levels of arrivals that we would have had pre-COVID-19. So there were some flashes of brilliance but the environment doesn't lend itself to being conducive for people to be able to travel in the volumes that they have over that period. So we expect to see tremendous fallout in comparison to how we have done in 2019 when we broke the record of about 423,000 visitors. For the Government Information Service, I am Jesse Leons reporting.


Hey, everybody. Welcome, welcome back. We are live here on the floor of ITW 2023. This is ITW Extra, powered by JSA TV, the official broadcast of ITW 2023. Again, guys, we are here in National Harbor, Maryland, right outside of D.C. You can see it from my window, the little monuments. Yeah, it's beautiful. I'm Jamie Skadokataya, CEO of JSA, and of course, my longtime friend and the CEO of NJFX, New Jersey Fiber Exchange. We have Mr. Gil Santilles. Gil, welcome back to JSA TV. Thank you, Jamie. Pleasure to be here with you as always. Always, always exciting. And you always have so much news. But for our viewers who may not already know, and they should, but just in case we can write this wrong, give us a little bit of background on your company. So as your viewers know, and of course, we spent some time, we started North America's first carrier-neutral cable landing station campus. And we were inspired somewhat from what interaction had done in Marseille. We took advantage of what they had created and started to create a model that was very similar, creating a carrier-neutral environment for subsea cables. So in the U.S. traditionally, when a cable lands in our country, it was always an incumbent that managed the connections from there inside. What we decided to do is to make it a neutral environment. Any subsea cable could connect to any North American provider and create a real sustainable connectivity network hub. NJFX today, I'm proud to say, has 35 network operators. So we've grown from the original subsea cables with Tata, a few backhaul providers, and now a vibrant 35 network ecosystem. Wow. Congratulations. That's really exciting. And I noticed on your press releases, your website, you boast unrivaled connectivity. I love that phrase when you're talking carrier-neutral cable landing station campus, especially for North America. And tell us a little bit more about this unique setup being carrier-neutral. What does that mean? So think of subsea cables as the arteries of the internet. It's where the main traffic crosses across countries, intercontinental. We tap those arteries with capillarity of networks in North America. We have internet exchanges like D-Kicks sitting there, collecting those networks, and then exchanging traffic at the cable landing station. It's the most efficient way to do this. What we've also done is take on the carrier hotel model. So carrier hotels traditionally in this country were the ones where networks went to meet because they were major metros. But the reality is they really should have met at the cable station because the carrier hotels were really just extensions into the U.S. of subsea cables. What we've now done is let the subsea cables bring the traffic there, inter-exchange it, and then continue on another subsea cable. So you could have an European to South American connection or to the Caribbean. It's really just an inter-exchange point. And as we're talking, it reminds me how global you really are. You work a great deal, of course, with global connectivity, designing network solutions for optimal performance. What are the steps for an enterprise that they can take when bringing in design of such a network, when they're working on their design? It's clarity. You've got to understand how things work, and we take the time to explain to the enterprises here the options you have in terms of fiber providers that come to the facility. Make sure they commit to you. The fiber they're going to give you has a certain route to get to our facility. You know which manholes you're coming in at the end, so you have some diversity there. And then on the subsea side, we try to connect you directly with the subsea operator. So now there's no misunderstanding of how I got from my data center, call it, in the U.S., out to London, Amsterdam, or even across to Marseille, across, that I actually traversed the Suez Canal. We try to make sure our enterprise customers understand what their carriers are doing and get clarity and commitment. It's such an infrastructure ecosystem, and for you guys to offer that insight and expertise, especially for enterprise customers coming in. That's critical. That's amazing. Thank you. Key differentiator for sure. Lastly, what are the trends that you're noticing, especially here in North America? So we're flattered that we have companies that are emulating what we've done. DC Blocks announced Myrtle Beach as a cable landing station and committed to being carrier-neutral, which means they're not going to own and operate a network. And they're hosting now a Google cable and it's public also another cable with Meta that's going to cross over to Europe and South America. So they like us are trying to create this ecosystem. We're five years ahead at this point in terms of collecting that capillarity in North America, but I'm proud to see that they like our model and they're emulating it now here in the U.S. We're hoping that our platform of trust, and that's what we do, our customers trust that we're going to do the right thing by them by not interfering in their business will expand to other continents. So we're exploring Asia, the Middle East in terms of other carrier-neutral cable landing station plays that might want that NGFX trusted brand. Very interesting. All right. We're going to keep our eye on you. And for our viewers who want to learn more, where can they go? Of course, our website at www.njfx.net. Welcome you to come to our site. Let us know how to reach out to you and set up a time to connect. NJFX.net, guys. Gil Tantalis, as always, a pleasure and honor. Thank you on such a busy day for spending a little time in our hot chair. My pleasure, Jamie, as always. I enjoy our 25-year plus relationship, and I give you credit to a lot of the success we had early on in helping us get to where we are today, and I want to say thank you again. Thank you, Gil. We always love and appreciate you. Sure. And thank you, viewers, for tuning in here at ITW Extra, powered by JSA TV. Happy networking.