It was a moving address you made over Ward Cheney—­that fortunate, youth!  Like Susy, he got out of life all that was worth the living, and got his great reward before he had crossed the tropic frontier of dreams and entered the Sahara of fact.  The deep consciousness of Susy’s good fortune is a constant comfort to me.

London is happy-hearted at last.  The British victories have swept the clouds away and there are no uncheerful faces.  For three months the private dinner parties (we go to no public ones) have been Lodges of Sorrow, and just a little depressing sometimes; but now they are smiley and animated again.  Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman and the Irish lady, the Scotch gentleman and the Scotch lady?  These are darlings, every one.  Night before last it was all Irish—­24.  One would have to travel far to match their ease and sociability and animation and sparkle and absence of shyness and self-consciousness.

It was American in these fine qualities.  This was at Mr. Lecky’s.  He is Irish, you know.  Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory’s.  Lord Roberts is Irish; and Sir William Butler; and Kitchener, I think; and a disproportion of the other prominent Generals are of Irish and Scotch breed-keeping up the traditions of Wellington, and Sir Colin Campbell of the Mutiny.  You will have noticed that in S. A. as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish and the Scotch that are placed in the fore-front of the battle.  An Irish friend of mine says this is because the Kelts are idealists, and enthusiasts, with age-old heroisms to emulate and keep bright before the world; but that the low-class Englishman is dull and without ideals, fighting bull-doggishly while he has a leader, but losing his head and going to pieces when his leader falls—­not so with the Kelt.  Sir Wm. Butler said “the Kelt is the spear-head of the British lance.” 
                         Love to you all. 
          
                                   Mark.

The Henry Robinson mentioned in the foregoing letter was Henry C. Robinson, one-time Governor of Connecticut, long a dear and intimate friend of the Clemens household.  “Lecky” was W. E. H. Lecky, the Irish historian whose History of European Morals had been, for many years, one of Mark Twain’s favorite books: 

In July the Clemenses left the small apartment at 30 Wellington Court and established a summer household a little way out of London, at Dollis Hill.  To-day the place has been given to the public under the name of Gladstone Park, so called for the reason that in an earlier time Gladstone had frequently visited there.  It was a beautiful spot, a place of green grass and spreading oaks.  In a letter in which Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister she said:  “It is simply divinely beautiful and peaceful; the great, old trees are beyond everything.  I believe nowhere in the world do you find such trees as in England.”  Clemens wrote to Twichell: