By-and-by, when he almost reached the station where he was to get off, he got up, crossed over, and he said:  “Now I am going to say something to you which I hope you will regard as a compliment.”  And then he went on to say:  “I have never seen Mark Twain, but I have seen a portrait of him, and any friend of mine will tell you that when I have once seen a portrait of a man I place it in my eye and store it away in my memory, and I can tell you now that you look enough like Mark Twain to be his brother.  Now,” he said, “I hope you take this as a compliment.  Yes, you are a very good imitation; but when I come to look closer, you are probably not that man.”

I said:  “I will be frank with you.  In my desire to look like that excellent character I have dressed for the character; I have been playing a part.”

He said:  “That is all right, that is all right; you look very well on the outside, but when it comes to the inside you are not in it with the original”

So when I come to a place like this with nothing valuable to say I always play a part.  But I will say before I sit down that when it comes to saying anything here I will express myself in this way:  I am heartily in sympathy with you in your efforts to help those who were sufferers in this calamity, and in your desire to heap those who were rendered homeless, and in saying this I wish to impress on you the fact that I am not playing a part.

SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

          After the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June 19,
          1906, Mr. Clemens talked to the assembled reporters about the
          San Francisco earthquake.

I haven’t been there since 1868, and that great city of San Francisco has grown up since my day.  When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand were Chinese.  I was a reporter on the Virginia City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and stayed there, I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco and got a job as a reporter on The Call.  I was there three or four years.

I remember one day I was walking down Third Street in San Francisco.  It was a sleepy, dull Sunday afternoon, and no one was stirring.  Suddenly as I looked up the street about three hundred yards the whole side of a house fell out.  The street was full of bricks and mortar.  At the same time I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood there stunned for a moment.

I thought it was an earthquake.  Nobody else had heard anything about it and no one said earthquake to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it.  Nobody else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the street was the only house in the city that felt it.  I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t a little performance gotten up for my especial entertainment by the nether regions.

CHARITY AND ACTORS