Is it imagination, or—­Anyway I seem to get furtive and fleeting glimpses which I take to be the weariness and condolence of age; indifference to sights and things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne; the boredom of travel:  the secret sigh behind the public smile, the private What-in-hell-did-I-come-for!

But maybe that is your art.  Maybe that is what you intend the reader to detect and think he has made a Columbus-discovery.  Then it is well done, perfectly done.  I wrote my last travel book—­[Following the Equator.] —­in hell; but I let on, the best I could, that it was an excursion through heaven.  Some day I will read it, and if its lying cheerfulness fools me, then I shall believe it fooled the reader.  How I did loathe that journey around the world!—­except the sea-part and India.

Evening.  My tail hangs low.  I thought I was a financier—­and I bragged to you.  I am not bragging, now.  The stock which I sold at such a fine profit early in January, has never ceased to advance, and is now worth $60,000 more than I sold it for.  I feel just as if I had been spending $20,000 a month, and I feel reproached for this showy and unbecoming extravagance.

Last week I was going down with the family to Budapest to lecture, and to make a speech at a banquet.  Just as I was leaving here I got a telegram from London asking for the speech for a New York paper.  I (this is strictly private) sent it.  And then I didn’t make that speech, but another of a quite different character—­a speech born of something which the introducer said.  If that said speech got cabled and printed, you needn’t let on that it was never uttered.

That was a darling night, and those Hungarians were lively people.  We were there a week and had a great time.  At the banquet I heard their chief orator make a most graceful and easy and beautiful and delicious speech—­I never heard one that enchanted me more—­although I did not understand a word of it, since it was in Hungarian.  But the art of it! —­it was superlative.

They are wonderful English scholars, these people; my lecture audience —­all Hungarians—­understood me perfectly—­to judge by the effects.  The English clergyman told me that in his congregation are 150 young English women who earn their living teaching their language; and that there are. others besides these.

For 60 cents a week the telephone reads the morning news to you at home; gives you the stocks and markets at noon; gives you lessons in 3 foreign languages during 3 hours; gives you the afternoon telegrams; and at night the concerts and operas.  Of course even the clerks and seamstresses and bootblacks and everybody else are subscribers.

(Correction.  Mrs. Clemens says it is 60 cents a month.)

I am renewing my youth.  I made 4 speeches at one banquet here last
Saturday night.  And I’ve been to a lot of football matches.