injury:  “never have I been stung by a wasp or a bee.”  And here is that proud note again that sings in that little child’s elation in being singled out, among all the company of children, for the random dog’s honor-conferring attentions.  “Even in the very worst summer for wasps, when, in lunching out of doors, our table was covered with them and every one else was stung, they never hurt me.”

When a queen whose qualities of mind and heart and character are able to add distinction to so distinguished a place as a throne, remembers with grateful exultation, after thirty years, honors and distinctions conferred upon her by the humble, wild creatures of the forest, we are helped to realize that complimentary attentions, homage, distinctions, are of no caste, but are above all cast —­that they are a nobility-conferring power apart.

We all like these things.  When the gate-guard at the railway-station passes me through unchallenged and examines other people’s tickets, I feel as the king, class A, felt when the emperor put the imperial hand on his shoulder, “everybody seeing him do it”; and as the child felt when the random dog allowed her to pat his head and ostracized the others; and as the princess felt when the wasps spared her and stung the rest; and I felt just so, four years ago in Vienna (and remember it yet), when the helmeted police shut me off, with fifty others, from a street which the Emperor was to pass through, and the captain of the squad turned and saw the situation and said indignantly to that guard: 

“Can’t you see it is the Herr Mark Twain?  Let him through!”

It was four years ago; but it will be four hundred before I forget the wind of self-complacency that rose in me, and strained my buttons when I marked the deference for me evoked in the faces of my fellow-rabble, and noted, mingled with it, a puzzled and resentful expression which said, as plainly as speech could have worded it:  “And who in the nation is the Herr Mark Twain Um GOTTESWILLEN?”

How many times in your life have you heard this boastful remark: 

“I stood as close to him as I am to you; I could have put out my hand and touched him.”

We have all heard it many and many a time.  It was a proud distinction to be able to say those words.  It brought envy to the speaker, a kind of glory; and he basked in it and was happy through all his veins.  And who was it he stood so close to?  The answer would cover all the grades.  Sometimes it was a king; sometimes it was a renowned highwayman; sometimes it was an unknown man killed in an extraordinary way and made suddenly famous by it; always it was a person who was for the moment the subject of public interest of a village.