Our game was neatly played, and successfully.—­None expected us, of course.  You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I said, “Announce his grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Rt.  Hon. the Earl of Hartford.”  Arrived within, we were all eyes to see the Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces, and they ours.  In a moment, they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she blooming with wholesome old age.  He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice:  “Come to my arms!  Away with titles—­I’ll know ye by no names but Twain and Twichell!  Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect:  God bless you, old Howells what is left of you!”

We talked late that night—­none of your silent idiot “communings” for us —­of the olden time.  We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him and resumed its sweeter forgotten name of New York.  In truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good Jesuit, as he has always been since O’Mulligan the First established that faith in the Empire.

And we canvassed everybody.  Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor—­but he didn’t mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise.  He was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston—­but there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn’t lie, so be it by the grace of God he got the opportunity.

The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred with the wounds got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a high chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny.  His granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately warned to the youngest of the Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the Howells’s may reign in the land?  I must not forget to say, while I think of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig.  Keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms.  Would you believe it?—­the Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you—­deafer than her husband.  They call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly and says “come in.....”

The monument to the author of “Gloverson and His Silent partners” is finished.  It is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man.  This noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all creatures.  Yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own great-grandchildren.