and felicitously complimentary to my books—­and I will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another.  I once mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book ‘Old Times on the Mississippi’; but there were others, among them some high praise of my description in ’A Tramp Abroad’ of certain striking phases of German student life.

“Fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the Emperor made a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then, without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but across the table to his brother, Prince Heinrich.  The Prince replied, endorsing the Emperor’s view of the matter.  Then I followed with my own view of it.  I said that in the beginning our government’s generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate and was a danger besides.  I think that that was about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it —­manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable.  I seemed to perceive this quite plainly.  I had committed an indiscretion.  Possibly it was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when I had not been invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion promulgated by his Majesty.  I do not know which it was, but I quite clearly remember the effect which my act produced—­to wit, the Emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting prevailed until about midnight.  I am sure that the Emperor’s good night was the only thing he said to me in all that time.

“Was this rebuke studied and intentional?  I don’t know, but I regarded it in that way.  I can’t be absolutely sure of it because of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances.  For example:  the Empress Dowager invited me to her palace, and the reigning Empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for General von Versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from my books.”

It was a personal message from the Emperor that fourteen years later recalled to him this curious circumstance.  A gentleman whom Clemens knew went on a diplomatic mission to Germany.  Upon being presented to Emperor William, the latter had immediately begun to talk of Mark Twain and his work.  He spoke of the description of German student life as the greatest thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the German language as wonderful; then he said: