Now, as this is probably the last time that I shall be out after nightfall this winter, I must say that I have come here with a mission, and I would make my errand of value.

Many compliments have been paid to Mr. Carnegie to-night.  I was expecting them.  They are very gratifying to me.

I have been a guest of honor myself, and I know what Mr. Carnegie is experiencing now.  It is embarrassing to get compliments and compliments and only compliments, particularly when he knows as well as the rest of us that on the other side of him there are all sorts of things worthy of our condemnation.

Just look at Mr. Carnegie’s face.  It is fairly scintillating with fictitious innocence.  You would think, looking at him, that he had never committed a crime in his life.  But no—­look at his pestiferious simplified spelling.  You can’t any of you imagine what a crime that has been.  Torquemada was nothing to Mr. Carnegie.  That old fellow shed some blood in the Inquisition, but Mr. Carnegie has brought destruction to the entire race.  I know he didn’t mean it to be a crime, but it was, just the same.  He’s got us all so we can’t spell anything.

The trouble with him is that he attacked orthography at the wrong end.  He meant well, but he, attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the disease.  He ought to have gone to work on the alphabet.  There’s not a vowel in it with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch anything to.  Look at the “h’s” distributed all around.  There’s “gherkin.”  What are you going to do with the “h” in that?  What the devil’s the use of “h” in gherkin, I’d like to know.  It’s one thing I admire the English for:  they just don’t mind anything about them at all.

But look at the “pneumatics” and the “pneumonias” and the rest of them.  A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving us an alphabet that we wouldn’t have to spell with at all, instead of this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken thief.  Why, there isn’t a man who doesn’t have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can’t spell them!  It’s like trying to do a St. Vitus’s dance with wooden legs.

Now I’ll bet there isn’t a man here who can spell “pterodactyl,” not even the prisoner at the bar.  I’d like to hear him try once—­but not in public, for it’s too near Sunday, when all extravagant histrionic entertainments are barred.  I’d like to hear him try in private, and when he got through trying to spell “pterodactyl” you wouldn’t know whether it was a fish or a beast or a bird, and whether it flew on its legs or walked with its wings.  The chances are that he would give it tusks and make it lay eggs.