out to meet the rainbow and got struck by
     lightning.  His joke was not of the Boston kind or size.  When its
     full nature burst upon the company—­when the ears of the assembled
     diners heard the sacred names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes
     lightly associated with human aspects removed—­oh, very far removed
    —­from Cambridge and Concord, a chill fell upon the diners that
     presently became amazement, and then creeping paralysis.  Nobody
     knew afterward whether the great speech that he had so gaily planned
     ever came to a natural end or not.  Somebody—­the next on the
     program—­attempted to follow him, but presently the company melted
     out of the doors and crept away into the night.

It seemed to Mark Twain that his career had come to an end.  Back in
Hartford, sweating and suffering through sleepless nights, he wrote
Howells his anguish.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Sunday Night. 1877.  My dear Howells,—­My sense of disgrace does not abate.  It grows.  I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies—­a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies.

I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present.  It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now.  So it is my opinion and my wife’s that the telephone story had better be suppressed.  Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?

It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much.  And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me!  It burns me like fire to think of it.

The whole matter is a dreadful subject—­let me drop it here—­at least on
paper. 
                         Penitently yrs,
          
                              mark.

Howells sent back a comforting letter.  “I have no idea of dropping you out of the Atlantic,” he wrote; “and Mr. Houghton has still less, if possible.  You are going to help and not hurt us many a year yet, if you will....  You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that, even in this world.”

Howells added that Charles Elliot Norton had expressed just the right feeling concerning the whole affair, and that many who had not heard the speech, but read the newspaper reports of it, had found it without offense.

Clemens wrote contrite letters to Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow, and received most gracious acknowledgments.  Emerson, indeed, had not heard the speech:  His faculties were already blurred by the mental mists that would eventually shut him in.  Clemens wrote again to Howells, this time with less anguish.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: