News came of the death of Henry M. Stanley, one of Mark Twain’s oldest friends.  Clemens once said that he had met Stanley in St. Louis where he (Clemens) had delivered a lecture which Stanley had reported.  In the following letter he fixes the date of their meeting as early in 1867, which would be immediately after Mark Twain’s return from California, and just prior to the Quaker City excursion—­a fact which is interesting only because it places the two men together when each was at the very beginning of a great career.

To Lady Stanley, in England: 

Villa di Quarto, Firenze, May 11, ’04.  Dear lady Stanley,—­I have lost a dear and honored friend—­how fast they fall about me now, in my age!  The world has lost a tried and proved hero.  And you—­what have you lost?  It is beyond estimate—­we who know you, and what he was to you, know that.  How far he stretches across my life!  I knew him when his work was all before him five years before the great day that he wrote his name far-away up on the blue of the sky for the world to see and applaud and remember; I have known him as friend and intimate ever since.  It is 37 years.  I have known no other friend and intimate so long, except John Hay—­a friendship which dates from the same year and the same half of it, the first half of 1867.  I grieve with you and with your family, dear Lady Stanley, it is all I can do; but that I do out of my heart.  It would be we, instead of I, if Mrs. Clemens knew, but in all these 20 months that she has lain a prisoner in her bed we have hidden from her all things that could sadden her.  Many a friend is gone whom she still asks about and still thinks is living.

In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself
                         Your friend,
                                        S. L. Clemens.

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

Villadi Quarto, May 11, ’04 dear Joe,—­Yours has this moment arrived—­just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley.  I believe the last country-house visit we paid in England was to Stanley’s.  Lord, how my friends and acquaintances fall about me now, in my gray-headed days!  Vereschagin, Mommsen, Dvorak, Lenbach, Jokai—­all so recently, and now Stanley.  I had known Stanley 37 years.  Goodness, who is it I haven’t known!  As a rule the necrologies find me personally interested—­when they treat of old stagers.  Generally when a man dies who is worth cabling, it happens that I have run across him somewhere, some time or other.

Oh, say!  Down by the Laurentian Library there’s a marble image that has been sitting on its pedestal some 450 Years, if my dates are right —­Cosimo I. I’ve seen the back of it many a time, but not the front; but yesterday I twisted my head around after we had driven by, and the profane exclamation burst from my mouth before I could think:  “there’s Chauncey Depew!”