“That reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes,” he said of one such performance.

Many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things continued; but Mark Twain was greater than that.  Eventually he employed a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great tribute of a great nation.

Of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the general applause.  Magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts.  He was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might give them.  He felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them.  He confined his work to a few magazines, and in November concluded an arrangement with the new management of Harper & Brothers, by which that firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word—­a rate increased to thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of his books.

The United States, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon private citizens.  We do not have decorations and titles, even though there are times when it seems that such things might be not inappropriately conferred.  Certain of the newspapers, more lavish in their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper phrased it, “Some peculiar recognition—­something that should appeal to Samuel L. Clemens, the man, rather than to Mark Twain, the literate.  Just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has no exact precedent.”

Perhaps the paper thought that Mark Twain was entitled—­as he himself once humorously suggested-to the “thanks of Congress” for having come home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the sort was ever seriously considered.  The thanks of the public at large contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind.  The paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the American expression of good-will.

But this was an unneeded suggestion.  If he had eaten all the dinners proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month.  As it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and the after-dinner speaking about to begin.  Even so the strain told on him.

“His friends saw that he was wearing himself out,” says Howells, and perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking cough.  He did not spare himself as often as he should have done.  Once to Richard Watson Gilder he sent this line of regrets: