I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) & answered 29 letters.  I have slaved at my mail every day since we arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite & presently I’ll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.

He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a year—­that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government.

The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one.  It was a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform.  Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening address.  It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark Twain’s declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform.

Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn’t speak again that year.  He had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied.  He declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.

“Think of it!” he wrote Twichell.  “Two old rebels functioning there:  I as president and Watterson as orator of the day!  Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank God!”

The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain’s speeches—­a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them), to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which he makes his climax.  He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then he said: 

It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood—­[Colonel Watterson’s forebears had intermarried with the Lamptons.]—­for we are that—­and one-time rebels—­for we were that—­should be chosen out of a million surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in reverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess —­Abraham Lincoln!  Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten?  Are the Blue and the Gray one to-day?  By authority of this sign we may answer yes; there was a Rebellion—­that incident is closed.

I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner; and in the Civil War