Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him.  His “first hour in England was an hour of delight,” he records; “of rapture and ecstasy.  These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate; they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision of rural England brought me.”  Then he noticed that the gentleman opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was absorbed in a green-covered volume.  He was so absorbed in it that, by and by, Clemens’s curiosity was aroused.  He shifted his position a little and his eye caught the title.  It was the first volume of the English edition of The Innocents Abroad.  This was gratifying for a moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even smiled during the hour of his steady reading.  Clemens recalled what he had heard of the English lack of humor.  He wondered if this was a fair example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word he was reading.  Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity.  It did not come.  During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the compartment remained heavy with gloom.

He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established himself, and went to look up his publishers.  He found the Routledges about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their publishing house.  He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table again until evening.  The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him.  Various refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering if America had any more of that sort at home.  By and by dinner was served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star.

Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.’—­[Clemens had first known Stanley as a newspaper man.  “I first met him when he reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis,” he said once in a conversation where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]

LXXXVI

ENGLAND

From that night Mark Twain’s stay in England could not properly be called a gloomy one.