of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize its action.  At all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise.  Then it sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away.  Clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his subject out of his mind.  He laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared more for that moment’s entertainment than for many philosophies.

In that remote solitude there was one important advantage—­there was no procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers.  Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him.  Even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and appointment.  Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough.  When the British Premier, Campbell-Bannerman, celebrated his seventieth birthday, the London Tribune and the New York Herald requested a tribute.  He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very old friend.  He had known him first at Marienbad in ’91, and in Vienna in ’98, in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel.  His tribute ran: 

To his excellency the British Premier,—­Congratulations, not condolences.  Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don’t have to behave unless we want to.  When I first knew you, Honored Sir, one of us was hardly even respected. 
                                   Mark Twain.

He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it.

Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer.  One day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters, supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers, and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household.  He was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations, after reading them aloud with great effect.  To tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little later he incorporated one of the Jennie Allen letters in a speech which he made at a Press Club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified spelling—­offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas.  The letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form.  Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure.  He even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents: