He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B.’s mind faded long before the hour ended.  Returning home, Clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor.

“George,” he said, “what pictures are these that gentleman left?”

“Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures!  Mrs. Clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places.  The gentleman was only looking at them while he waited for you to come down.”

It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Mark Twain the degree of Master of Arts.  He was proud of the honor, for it was recognition of a kind that had not come to him before—­remarkable recognition, when we remember how as a child he had hated all schools and study, having ended his class-room days before he was twelve years old.  He could not go to New Haven at the time, but later in the year made the students a delightful address.  In his capacity of Master of Arts, he said, he had come down to New Haven to institute certain college reforms.

By advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department.  I told the Greek Professor I had concluded to drop the use of the Greek-written character, because it is so hard to spell with and so impossible to read after you get it spelt.  Let us draw the curtain there.  I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man.

He said he had given advice to the mathematical department with about the same result.  The astronomy department he had found in a bad way.  He had decided to transfer the professor to the law department and to put a law-student in his place.

A boy will be more biddable, more tractable—­also cheaper.  It is true he cannot be entrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebula till he gets his hand in.

It was hardly the sort of an address that the holder of a college degree is expected to make, but doctors and students alike welcomed it hilariously from Mark Twain.

Not many great things happened to Mark Twain during this long period of semi-literary inaction, but many interesting ones.  When Bill Nye, the humorist, and James Whitcomb Riley joined themselves in an entertainment combination, Mark Twain introduced them to their first Boston audience—­a great event to them, and to Boston.  Clemens himself gave a reading now and then, but not for money.  Once, when Col.  Richard Malcolm Johnston and Thomas Nelson Page were to give a reading in Baltimore, Page’s wife fell ill, and Colonel Johnston wired to Charles Dudley Warner, asking him to come in Page’s stead.  Warner, unable to go, handed the telegram to Clemens, who promptly answered that he would come.  They read to a packed house, and when the audience had gone and the returns were counted, an equal amount was handed to each of the authors.  Clemens pushed his share over to Johnston, saying: 

“That’s yours, Colonel.  I’m not reading for money these days.”