tongue?  What’s the trouble with him, that long, lank cadaver, old oil-derrick out of a job—­who is that?” “Well, now,” Mr. Dana said, “you don’t want to meddle with him; you had better keep quiet; just keep quiet, because that’s a bad man.  Talk!  He was born to talk.  Don’t let him get out with you; he’ll skin you.”  I said, “I have been skinned, skinned, and skinned for years, there is nothing left.”  He said, “Oh, you’ll find there is; that man is the very seed and inspiration of that proverb which says, ’No matter how close you skin an onion, a clever man can always peel it again.’” Well, I reflected and I quieted down.  That would never occur to Tom Reed.  He’s got no discretion.  Well, MacVeagh is just the same man; he hasn’t changed a bit in all those years; he has been peeling Mr. Mitchell lately.  That’s the kind of man he is.

Mr. Howells—­that poem of his is admirable; that’s the way to treat a person.  Howells has a peculiar gift for seeing the merits of people, and he has always exhibited them in my favor.  Howells has never written anything about me that I couldn’t read six or seven times a day; he is always just and always fair; he has written more appreciatively of me than any one in this world, and published it in the North American Review.  He did me the justice to say that my intentions—­he italicized that—­that my intentions were always good, that I wounded people’s conventions rather than their convictions.  Now, I wouldn’t want anything handsomer than that said of me.  I would rather wait, with anything harsh I might have to say, till the convictions become conventions.  Bangs has traced me all the way down.  He can’t find that honest man, but I will look for him in the looking-glass when I get home.  It was intimated by the Colonel that it is New England that makes New York and builds up this country and makes it great, overlooking the fact that there’s a lot of people here who came from elsewhere, like John Hay from away out West, and Howells from Ohio, and St. Clair McKelway and me from Missouri, and we are doing what we can to build up New York a little-elevate it.  Why, when I was living in that village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and Hay up in the town of Warsaw, also on the banks of the Mississippi River it is an emotional bit of the Mississippi, and when it is low water you have to climb up to it on a ladder, and when it floods you have to hunt for it; with a deep-sea lead—­but it is a great and beautiful country.  In that old time it was a paradise for simplicity—­it was a simple, simple life, cheap but comfortable, and full of sweetness, and there was nothing of this rage of modern civilization there at all.  It was a delectable land.  I went out there last June, and I met in that town of Hannibal a schoolmate of mine, John Briggs, whom I had not seen for more than fifty years.  I tell you, that was a meeting!  That pal whom I had known as a little boy long ago, and knew now as a