from artillery practice.”  From Mark Twain’s report, “Stirring Times in Austria,” in Literary Essays,]—­He was intensely interested.  Nothing would appeal to him more than that, unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change.  He was also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge.  It was a very great occasion, a “tremendous episode,” he says.

The memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day.  In the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen but three times before.  It takes imposing place among the world’s unforgetable things.  I think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have seen it once.

Wild reports were sent to the American press; among them one that Mark Twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his handkerchief and shouted “Hoch die Deutschen!” he had been struck by an officer of the law.  Of course nothing of the kind happened.  The sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend who suggested that Clemens be allowed to remain: 

“Oh, I know him very well.  I recognize him by his pictures, and I should be very glad to let him stay, but I haven’t any choice because of the strictness of the order.”

Clemens, however, immediately ran across a London Times correspondent, who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit.

Mark Twain’s report of the Austrian troubles, published in Harper’s Magazine the following March and now included with the Literary Essays, will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history.

It was during these exciting political times in Vienna that a representative of a New York paper wrote, asking for a Mark Twain interview.  Clemens replied, giving him permission to call.  When the reporter arrived Clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much his habit.  At the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to enter.  The door was ajar and he heard Mrs. Clemens say: 

“Youth, don’t you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your being in bed?”

And he heard Mark Twain’s easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply: 

“Why, Livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for him.”

Clemens became a privileged character in Vienna.  Official rules were modified for his benefit.  Everything was made easy for him.  Once, on a certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge suddenly rode up: 

“Let him pass,” he commanded.  “Lieber Gott!  Don’t you see it’s Herr Mark Twain?”