“To be quiet about this.”

“Indeed I won’t; it’s the best thing ever happened.  I’ll tell it and add to it & I wish Joe & Howells were here to make it perfect; I can’t make all the rightful blunders by myself—­it takes all three of us to do justice to an opportunity like this.  I would just like to see Howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his futile & inventionless subterfuges when that Princess comes raging in here & wanting to know.”

But Livy could not hear fun—­it was not a time to be trying to be funny.  We were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it —­Just then the door spread wide & our Princess & 4 more & 3 little Princes flowed in!  Our Princess & her sister, the Archduchess Maria Theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl Archduchesses present, & aunt to the 3 little Princes), & we shook hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel.  We were invited for a o’clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour & a half.

Wasn’t it a rattling good comedy situation?  Seems a kind of pity we were the right ones.  It would have been such nuts to see the right ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably & nobody suspecting us for impostors.

Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Crane: 

Of course I know that I should have courtesied to her Imperial Majesty & not quite so deep to her Royal Highness, and that Mr. Clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected that I had no time to prepare, and if I had had I should not have been there; I only went in to help Mr. C. with my bad German.  When our minister’s wife is going to be presented to the Archduchess she practises her courtesying beforehand.

They had met royalty in simple American fashion and no disaster had followed.

We have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered in the Clemens apartments at the Hotel Metropole.  They were of many nations and ranks.  It was the winter in London of twenty-five years before over again.  Only Mark Twain was not the same.  Then he had been unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished familiar of courts and embassies—­at home equally with poets and princes, authors and ambassadors and kings.  Such famous ones were there as Vereshchagin, Leschetizky, Mark Hambourg, Dvorak, Lenbach, and Jokai, with diplomats of many nations.  A list of foreign names may mean little to the American reader, but among them were Neigra, of Italy; Paraty, of Portugal; Lowenhaupt, of Sweden; and Ghiki, of Rumania.  The Queen of Rumania, Carmen Sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and warm admirer of Mark Twain.  The Princess Metternich, and Madame de Laschowska, of Poland, were among those who came, and there were Nansen and his wife, and Campbell-Bannerman, who was afterward British Premier.  Also there was Spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of Clara Clemens and her father, and other artists and potentates—­the list is too long.