No doubt it was well packed away in his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard from.  I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there wasn’t any fog left.  He didn’t go on—­he didn’t last long.  It was not many sentence’s after his first before he began to hesitate, and break, and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.

Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than one-third finished, but it ended there.  Nobody rose.  The next man hadn’t strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied, paralyzed; it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try.  Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere.  Howells mournfully, and without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and supported us out of the room.  It was very kind—­he was most generous.  He towed us tottering away into same room in that building, and we sat down there.  I don’t know what my remark was now, but I know the nature of it.  It was the kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can help your case.  But Howells was honest—­he had to say the heart-breaking things he did say:  that there was no help for this calamity, this shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that had ever happened in anybody’s history—­and then he added, “That is, for you—­and consider what you have done for Bishop.  It is bad enough in your case, you deserve, to suffer.  You have committed this crime, and you deserve to have all you are going to get.  But here is an innocent man.  Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him.  He can never hold his head up again.  The world can never look upon Bishop as being a live person.  He is a corpse.”

That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two whenever it forced its way into my mind.

Now then, I take that speech up and examine it.  As I said, it arrived this morning, from Boston.  I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn’t a single defect in it from the first word to the last.  It is just as good as good can be.  It is smart; it is saturated with humor.  There isn’t a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.  What could have been the matter with that house?  It is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn’t shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all.  Could the fault have been with me?  Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was going to describe in such a strange fashion?  If that happened, if I showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can’t be successfully funny if you show that you are afraid of it.  Well, I can’t account for it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they’d run all over that stage.  Oh, the fault must have been with me, it is not in the speech at all.