Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you deserve to be.  I can’t ask this on the score of any past favors, for there have been none.  I have not always spoken of you in terms of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due, I suppose, in part to an envious spirit.  I am simply human.  Some people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of those more successful.  I can’t.  They are divine; I am not.

It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge, to get him a hearing for his work.  He adds: 

I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from yours.  Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right service....  Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation.  Certainly, if I was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I’d make it rattle livelier than ever I did before.  I have occasionally thought of London Bridge, but the Thames is now so d—–­d cold and dirty, and besides I can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.

Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal more, no doubt, for that was his way.  Mulford came up, as he had prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he had contemplated.  Years after he was one day found drifting off the shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.

Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second London lecture period.  His response to the toast of the “Ladies,” delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was the sensational event of the evening.

He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor’s dinner, whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the finale, when the welcome would be “none the less hearty,” and bespoke his attendance for any future dinners.

Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of diminishing.  Early in January he wrote to Twichell: 

I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large enough.  I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall and wonders that I could fill it so long.

I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.

In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer’s paintings at the Royal Academy: