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 60 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 5 cents I know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable—­by me.  I have many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cents apiece up to $1.66 apiece; I bought none of them, they were all presents; they are an accumulation of several years.  I have never smoked one of them & 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 brier-root 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 down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey Depew 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.