Nothing could have appealed to him more, and the Punch dinner, with its associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory from all other feastings.

Clemens had intended to return early in July, but so much was happening that he postponed his sailing until the 13th.  Before leaving America, he had declined a dinner offered by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool.

Repeatedly urged to let Liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered now, and on the day following the Punch dinner, on July 10th, they carried him, with T. P. O’Connor (Tay Pay) in the Prince of Wales’s special coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town Hall.  Clemens was too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived rested and fresh to respond to his toast.  Perhaps because it was his farewell speech in England, he made that night the most effective address of his four weeks’ visit—­one of the most effective of his whole career:  He began by some light reference to the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels and the State Regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and with even greater variety.  Then laying all levity aside, he told them, like the Queen of Sheba, all that was in his heart.

. . .  Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own home beyond the ocean.  Oxford has conferred upon me the highest honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life’s prizes.  It is the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others, the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift of man or state.  During my four weeks’ sojourn in England I have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor—­the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart.  It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too.  Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.  It was like this:  There was a presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was always hailing every ship that came in sight.  He did it just to hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur.  One day a majestic Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the Orient.  It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle!  Of course the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail, “Ship