April 19th, 1906

For the benefit of

Robert Fulton Memorial Association

Military organization old guard in
full dress uniform will be present

Music by old guard band

Tickets and boxes on sale at Carnegie hall
and Waldorf-Astoria

Seats $1.50, $1.00, 50 Cents

It was not likely that I should laugh.  I had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth.  It did not for the moment occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice-presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour.  Let me hurry on to say that it did not happen.  I dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to my immeasurable relief.

It was a magnificent occasion.  That spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort.  General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the republic.  The band played “America” as Mark Twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome.  Some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in San Francisco, forty years before, when his fortunes had hung in the balance.  Perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it.  At all events, he did a different thing.  He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood.  Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands.

I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short.  I think few took account of time.  To a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied: 

    I cannot say for sure.  It is my custom to keep on talking till I
    get the audience cowed.  Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen
    minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour.

There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed.  The house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners.  It did not matter.  The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was enough.  The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career.