Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to deliver his speech.

I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering:  dimly I can see a hundred people—­no, perhaps fifty—­shadowy figures, sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore.  I don’t know who they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good- fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light, first one way and then another—­a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people).  I can see those figures with entire distinctiness across this abyss of time.

William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment aptly chosen for his so-different theme.  “And then,” to quote Howells, “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us.”

After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror.  Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake.  He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end.  And somehow he did it, while “there fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.”

Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that one speaker made an effort to follow him—­Bishop, the novelist, and that Bishop didn’t last long.

    It was not many sentences after his first before he began to
    hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at
    last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.

The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up.

Howells’s next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom: 

“Well, Mark, you’re a funny fellow.”

He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford in a writhing agony of spirit.  He believed that he was ruined forever, so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake could never be wholly repaired.  The fact that certain papers quoted the speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort.  But perhaps his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon Howells.  He put his heart into a brief letter: