“Wait,” said Sarony with confidence, “let me show you.”  He borrowed my overcoat—­and put it on the gorilla.  The result was surprising.  I saw that the gorilla while not looking distinctly like me was exactly what my great grand father would have looked like if I had had one.  Sarong photographed the creature in that overcoat, and spread the picture about the world.  It has remained spread about the world ever since.  It turns up every week in some newspaper somewhere or other.  It is not my favorite, but to my exasperation it is everybody else’s.  Do you think you could get it suppressed for me?  I will pay the limit. 
                              Sincerely yours,
                                        S. L. Clemens.

The year 1905 closed triumphantly for Mark Twain.  The great “Seventieth Birthday” dinner planned by Colonel George Harvey is remembered to-day as the most notable festival occasion in New York literary history.  Other dinners and ovations followed.  At seventy he had returned to the world, more beloved, more honored than ever before.

XLV

Letters, 1906, to various persons.  The farewell lecture.  A second summer in Dublin.  Billiards and copyright

Mark Twain at “Pier Seventy,” as he called it, paused to look backward and to record some memoirs of his long, eventful past.  The Autobiography dictations begun in Florence were resumed, and daily he traveled back, recalling long-ago scenes and all-but-forgotten places.  He was not without reminders.  Now and again there came some message that brought back the old days—­the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn days—­or the romance of the river that he never recalled other than with tenderness and a tone of regret that it was gone.  An invitation to the golden wedding of two ancient friends moved and saddened him, and his answer to it conveys about all the story of life.

To Mr. and Mrs. Gordon: 

         &nb
sp;                                             21 Fifth Avenue,
                                                       Jan. 24, ’06. 
Dear GORDONS,—­I have just received your golden-wedding “At Home” and am trying to adjust my focus to it and realize how much it means.  It is inconceivable!  With a simple sweep it carries me back over a stretch of time measurable only in astronomical terms and geological periods.  It brings before me Mrs. Gordon, young, round-limbed, handsome; and with her the Youngbloods and their two babies, and Laura Wright, that unspoiled little maid, that fresh flower of the woods and the prairies.  Forty-eight years ago!

Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now.  When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it.  Three years ago he asked me to testify again:  I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say.