How many things have happened in the seven years I have been away from home!  We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a rare thing in history.  We have turned aside from our own comfort and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own gates, but in our own neighborhood.  We have set Cuba free and placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world.  We started out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteous plan miscarried perhaps I shall never know.  We have also been making a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all the other powers can say.  The “Yellow Terror” is threatening the world, but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had no part in it.

Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver.  We have watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child, but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some pestiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something.  I fear we will never raise that child.

We’ve done more than that.  We elected a President four years ago.  We’ve found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare to do it over again.

One club followed another in honoring Mark Twain—­the Aldine, the St. Nicholas, the Press clubs, and other associations and societies.  His old friends were at these dinners—­Howells, Aldrich, Depew, Rogers, ex-Speaker Reed—­and they praised him and gibed him to his and their hearts’ content.

It was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his subject.

At the dinner given to him by the St. Nicholas Club he said, with deep irony: 

Gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world, and the most fragrant and the purest.  The very angels of heaven envy you and wish they had a government like it up there.  You got it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person, or any assault was made upon her fair fame.  It is you who have made this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and despair of the other capitals of the world—­and God bless you for it, gentlemen, God bless you!  And when you get to heaven at last they’ll say with joy, “Oh, there they come, the representatives of the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel’s box and turn on the limelight!”

Those hearers who in former years had been indifferent