end of it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so debase myself.  And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other’s foreheads “communing” I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation.  In our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and “rot,” mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation.

It is sixty years since I was here before.  I walked hither then with my precious old friend.  It seems incredible now that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection.  I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer.  Men were men in those old times.  Think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat.

My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so I was nearly an hour on my journey.  But by the goodness of God thirteen of the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so I was content to lose the time.  I love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us forever.

Our game was neatly played, and successfully.  None expected us, of course.  You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I said, “Announce his Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Right Honorable the Earl of Hartford.”  Arrived within, we were all eyes to see the Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces and they ours.  In a moment they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age.  He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, “Come to my arms!  Away with titles—­I’ll know ye by no names but Twain and Twichell!” Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect:  “God bless you, old Howells, what is left of you!”

We talked late that night—­none of your silent idiot “communings” for us —­of the olden time.  We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the Lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter, forgotten name of New York.  In truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good Jesuit as he has always been since O’Mulligan the First established that faith in the empire.

And we canvassed everybody.  Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor; but he didn’t mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise.  He was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston; but there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn’t lie, so be it by the grace of God he got the opportunity.