storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly and odiously out of the question.

Very well.  On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave, long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without break or wrinkle, to his ankles.  He came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us.  Everybody could see that we knew him.  A nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.

However, Thompson didn’t know that anything was happening.  He had no prejudices about clothes.  I can still see him as he looked when we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.  Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level with his neck.  There were scoffers observing, but he didn’t know it; he wasn’t disturbed.

In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me down in shorthand.  The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr. Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty’s progress across the Channel and write an account of it.  I can’t recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor as mine.

They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took place—­the arrival of the Shah of Persia—­and were comfortably quartered at the Langham Hotel.  To Twichell Clemens wrote: 

We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor, our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).

    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.

    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back. 
    I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I’ve got
    anyway.  And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.

Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared:  “It is perfectly discouraging to try to write you.  There is so much to write about that it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.”

It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment.  If Mark Twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now.  His rooms at the Langham were like a court.  Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B. Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his fame) were among those that called to pay their respects.  In a recent letter she says: