Halliday—­ah, that’s the name—­Ben Halliday, your uncle [turning to Mr. Carnegie].  That was the fellow—­Ben Halliday—­and Jack was full of admiration at the prodigious speed that that line of stages made—­and it was good speed—­one hundred and twenty-five miles a day, going day and night, and it was the event of Jack’s life, and there at the Fords of the Jordan the colonel was inspired to a speech (he was always making a speech), so he called us up to him.  He called up five sinners and three saints.  It has been only lately that Mr. Carnegie beatified me.  And he said:  “Here are the Fords of the Jordan—­a monumental place.  At this very point, when Moses brought the children of Israel through—­he brought the children of Israel from Egypt through the desert you see them—­he guarded them through that desert patiently, patiently during forty years, and brought them to this spot safe and sound.  There you see—­there is the scene of what Moses did.”

And Jack said:  “Moses who?”

“Oh,” he says, “Jack, you ought not to ask that!  Moses, the great law-giver!  Moses, the great patriot!  Moses, the great warrior!  Moses, the great guide, who, as I tell you, brought these people through these three hundred miles of sand in forty years, and landed there safe and sound.”

Jack said:  “There’s nothin’ in that three hundred miles in forty years.  Ben Halliday would have snaked ’em through in thirty—­six hours.”

Well, I was speaking of Jack’s innocence, and it was beautiful.  Jack was not ignorant on all subjects.  That boy was a deep student in the history of Anglo-Saxon liberty, and he was a patriot all the way through to the marrow.  There was a subject that interested him all the time.  Other subjects were of no concern to Jack, but that quaint, inscrutable innocence of his I could not get Williams to put into the picture.

Yes, Williams wanted to do it.  He said:  “I will make him as innocent as a virgin.”  He thought a moment, and then said, “I will make him as innocent as an unborn virgin;” which covered the ground.

I was reminded of Jack because I came across a letter to-day which is over thirty years old that Jack wrote.  Jack was doomed to consumption.  He was very long and slim, poor creature; and in a year or two after he got back from that excursion, to the Holy Land he went on a ride on horseback through Colorado, and he did not last but a year or two.

He wrote this letter, not to me, but to a friend of mine; and he said:  “I have ridden horseback”—­this was three years after—­“I hate ridden horseback four hundred miles through a desert country where you never see anything but cattle now and then, and now and then a cattle station—­ten miles apart, twenty miles apart.  Now you tell Clemens that in all that stretch of four hundred miles I have seen only two books—­the Bible and ‘Innocents Abroad’.  Tell Clemens the Bible was in a very good condition.”