I should like to know how & where it happened.  In the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to conceal it.  This is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally invented one:  you told me yourself once that you threw artificial power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by “banging the Bible”—­(your own words).  You have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks.  You would better jump around.  We all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon us.  Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark.

Mrs. Clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great hopes of her complete recovery.  Clemens took up some work—­a new Huck Finn story, inspired by his trip to Hannibal.  It was to have two parts —­Huck and Tom in youth, and then their return in old age.  He did some chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to Howells of his plan.  Howells answered: 

It is a great lay-out:  what I shall enjoy most will be the return of the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying.  There is a matchless chance there.  I suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in this prefatory part.

But the new story did not reach completion.  Huck and Tom would not come back, even to go over the old scenes.

CCXXIV

THE SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY DINNER

It was on the evening of the 27th of November, 1902, I at the Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col.  George Harvey, president of the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his sixty-seventh birthday.  The actual date fell three days later; but that would bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be more than likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was chosen.  Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers with a poem, “A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain,” which closed: 

       Still, to have everything beyond cavil right,
       We will dine with you here till Sunday night.

Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he would ever make, as it was also one of his best.  All the speakers did well that night, and they included some of the country’s foremost in oratory:  Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne MacVeagh.  Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems.  The chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by maintaining an attitude of “thinking ambassador” for the guest of the evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes.

“The limit has been reached,” he announced at the close of Dr. van Dyke’s poem.  “More that is better could not be said.  Gentlemen, Mr. Clemens.”