Latterly, the newspapers are full of the impending marriage of Gladys, sister of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, with Count SzéchényiⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note. It is a love match—of this there is no doubt. Two years ago the bride accomplished her twenty-first year and came into her fortune of twelve million five hundred thousand dollars—but the groom is very rich, and could have supported her without that. His is a great and old house. I knew the head of it in Vienna nine or ten years agoⒺexplanatory note , a charming man, and of high character. He told me how to pronounce his name. He said that in my long residence in the Territory of Nevada I must have become acquainted with the one wild bird in America which prefers sand and sage-brushⒶtextual note to a Christian life, and therefore inhabits Nevada instead of stepping over into California, which it could do at no cost of time or trouble. He was referring to the sage-hen. He said that if you pronounce sage-hen swiftly, and add about half a syllable onto the end of it,Ⓐtextual note the result would be a close resemblance to his name.

It is well enough for American girls to marry Englishmen, Scotchmen or Irishmen, but they ought to draw the line there, as regards foreigners. When they marry a foreigner of any other nationality the chances are nine to one that they will regret it—if the foreigner be a Frenchman, an Italian, a German, a Russian or a Turk; and when he is an Austrian, a Hungarian, or a Bohemian, of noble degree, the chances are ninety-nine to one that in time the girlⒶtextual note will wish she hadn’t made the venture. In other foreign countries she takes her husband’s rank; in the lastⒶtextual note three mentioned she has no rank at all, and is a nobody. Her husband is in society, but she isn’t. He attends court functions, the ambassadorial functions, and the dinners, luncheons, and teas, of the nobility, while she abides lonely and homesick in her palace and rocks the baby. She could have social relations with the merchant class, but she mustn’t; it would be out of character, out of taste, and the nobility would frown upon it. John Hay told me these things many years ago, after he had served a term at the Austrian court as our chargéⒶtextual note d’affairesⒺexplanatory note, and they were repeated to me in Vienna by persons qualified to testify.

In Vienna Mrs. Clemens and I visited with some frequency the American wife of an Austrian nobleman, a lady whom I had known when she was a young girlⒺexplanatory note. Her husband went everywhere, she went nowhere; she was marooned in her home, and her only society, her only companionship in her solitude, was her little boy aged seven. Her husband was poor when she married him; she enriched him with a great fortune. She loved him, and he loved her dearly, and would gladly have taken her into society if he could have done it, but it was out of his power.

I was told of a case which strikingly exhibits the boiler-iron rigidity of the rule: in the Revolution of 1848 a young Scotch officer in the imperial guard saved the young Emperor’s lifeⒺexplanatory note at desperate risk to his own; he was rewarded with promotion after promotion; he was retained near the monarch’s person; he was Hof-fähig Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note, and was thus entitled to the privileges enjoyed by the nobility. He was courted, he was envied, he was exceedingly [begin page 164] popular, and was regarded as the most fortunate man of his time. He had been poor, but he was able to marry now. His untitled Scotch sweetheart had been faithfully waiting for him; he went home and married her and brought her to Vienna, and laid all his honors at her feet. They had to stay where he laid them, for it was not her privilege to pick up any one of them and wear it. The society in which he moved was barred against her. She had been a plebeian, she was still a plebeian, yet the custom which forbadeⒶtextual note her to associate with the aristocracy also forbadeⒶtextual note her to associate with plebeians; she was as hopelessly marooned as was ever a castaway on a desert island in the ocean; neither the Emperor’s gratitude nor the nation’s could ameliorate her desolate estate. But—behold, and give praise!Ⓐtextual note Glory and high fortune had not deteriorated her gallant Scot; he was gallant still: heⒶtextual note flung his honors, his dignities, his offices and his emoluments out of the window, so to speak, and shook the dust of Austria off his feet and departed with his bride to begin life again and make a home elsewhere. If he had been an Austrian, instead of a foreigner, his case would have been different, and pleasanter. All that his wife needed would have been to become Hof-fähig Ⓐtextual note, and this could have been promptly and easily managed by conferring hereditary nobility upon her great-grandfather in his grave, a procedure which had been in use in China ages before Austria adopted it. But this poor Scotch girl’s great-grandfather was a foreigner, and not eligible.

Speaking of Vienna reminds me that I am invited to give a public reading, next week, in the village of Tuxedo, which is clustered around the little railway station just outside the Park. Reading on the platform is an art by itself, and I learned it all of a sudden in Vienna—and purely by accident—after having practised it in a lame and incompetent way for severalⒶtextual note years all over America and all round the globe. This education came late, for when I had made my good-night bow to an audience in a South African town two years beforeⒺexplanatory note, I took my farewell of the platform for good and all. I reserved the privilege of reading and talking gratis, for charities, when I should wish to do it, but I was resolved never to talk for pay again. I have read and talked many times since, in these eleven years, but never for pay. It is a delight to read and talk when one is not charging anything for it, for that condition sets you free from all sense of responsibility, and you are quite sure to have a good time.

When I read for a charity the first time, in Vienna, I was still ignorant; it was when I read there the second time that I learned the artⒺexplanatory note. No, I am making a mistake. I had long known the art of reading when one knows his chapters by heart and has in the course of many repetitions of them thoroughly weeded them, revised them, perfected them, and learned exactly the right way to deliver them; his art is perfect then, and cannot be improved. But it was another form that I learned in Vienna. It was there that I learned to read effectively without knowing my lesson. This art is just as good as the other one, just as telling, just as satisfactory, just as sure and just as triumphant, and has one great merit—to wit, that it requires little or no preparation, and possesses also another great merit, which is this: since you are acquainted with nothing but the outline of your piece and must invent the phrasing on the spot, this fresh and unstudied phrasing is pretty frequentlyⒶtextual note happy—not to go further and say sparkling.

What is called a “reading,” as a public platform entertainment, was first essayed by Charles Dickens, I think. He brought the idea with him from England in 1867Ⓔexplanatory note. He had made it very popular at home, and he made it so acceptable and so popular in America that his houses were crowded everywhere, and in a single season he earned two hundred thousand dollars. I heard him once during that season; it was in Steinway Hall, in December, and it made the fortune of my life—not in dollars, I am not thinking of dollars; it made the real fortune of my life in that it made the happiness of my life; on that day I called at the St. Nicholas Hotel to see my Quaker City Ⓐtextual note Excursion shipmate, Charley Langdon, and was introduced to a sweet and timid and lovely young girl,Ⓐtextual note his sister. The family went to the Dickens reading, and I accompanied themⒺexplanatory note. It was forty years ago; from that day to this the sister has never been out of my mind nor heart.Ⓐtextual note

Mr. Dickens read scenes from his printed books. From my distance, he was a small and slender figure,Ⓐtextual note rather fancifully dressed, and striking and picturesque in appearance. He wore a black velvet coat with a large and glaring red flower in the buttonholeⒶtextual note. He stood under a red-upholsteredⒶtextual note shed behind whose slant was a row of strong lights—just such an arrangement as artists use to concentrate a strong light upon a great picture. Dickens’s audience sat in a pleasant twilight, while he performed in the powerful light cast upon him from the concealed lamps. He read with great force and animation,Ⓐtextual note in the lively passages, and with stirring effect. It will be understood that he did not merely read, but also acted. His reading of the storm scene in which Steerforth lost his lifeⒺexplanatory note, was so vivid, and so full of energetic action, that his house was carried off its feet, so to speak.

Dickens had set a fashion which others tried to follow, but I do not remember that any one was any more than temporarily successful in it. The public reading was discarded after a time, and was not resumedⒶtextual note until something more than twenty years after Dickens had introduced it; then it rose and struggled along for a while in that curious and artless industry called Authors’ ReadingsⒺexplanatory note. When Providence had had enough of that kind of crime the Authors’ Readings ceased from troubling and left the world at peace.

Lecturing and reading were quite different things; the lecturer didn’t use notes,Ⓐtextual note or manuscript,Ⓐtextual note or book, but got his lecture by heart, and delivered it night after night in the same words during the whole lecture season of four winter months. The lecture field had been a popular one all over the country for many years when I entered it in 1868; it was then at the top of its popularity; in every town there was an organization of citizens who occupied themselves in the off season, every year, in arranging for a course of lectures for the coming winter; they chose their platform people from the Boston Lecture Agency list, and they chose according to the town’s size and ability to pay the prices. The course usually consisted of eight or ten lectures. All that was wanted was that it should pay expenses; that it should come out with a money balance at the end of the season was not required. Very small towns had to put up with fifty-dollar men and women, with one or two second-class stars at a hundred dollars each as an attraction; big towns employed [begin page 166] hundred-dollar men and women altogether, and added John B. Gough, or Henry Ward Beecher, or Anna Dickinson, or Wendell Phillips, as a compelling attraction; large cities employed this whole battery of stars. Anna Dickinson’s price was four hundred dollars a night; so was Henry Ward Beecher’s; so was Gough’s—when he didn’t charge five or six hundred. I don’t remember Wendell Phillips’sⒶtextual note price, but it was high.

I remained in the lecture field three seasonsⒺexplanatory note—long enough to learn the trade; then domesticated myself, in my new married estate,Ⓐtextual note after a weary life of wandering, and remained under shelter at home for fourteen or fifteen years. Meantime, speculators and money-makers had taken up the business of hiring lecturers, with the idea of getting rich at it. In about five years they killed that industry dead, and when I returned to the platform for a season, in 1884Ⓔexplanatory note, there had been a happy and holy silence for ten years, and a generation had come to the front who knew nothing about lectures and readings and didn’t know how to take them nor what to make of them. They were difficult audiences, those untrained squads, and Cable and I had a hard time with them sometimes.

Cable had been scouting the country alone for three years with readings from his novels, and he had been a good reader in the beginning, for he had been born with a natural talent for itⒺexplanatory note; but unhappily he prepared himself for his public work by taking lessons from a teacher of elocution, and so by the time he was ready to begin his platform work he was so well and thoroughly educated that he was merely theatrical and artificial, and not half as pleasing and entertainingⒺexplanatory note to a house as he had been in the splendid days of his ignorance. I had never tried reading as a trade, and I wanted to try it. I hired Major Pond, on a percentage, to conduct me over the country, and I hired Cable as a helper, at six hundred dollars a week and expenses, and we started out on our ventureⒺexplanatory note. It was ghastly! At least in the beginning. I had selected my readings well enoughⒺexplanatory note, but had not studied them. I supposed it would only be necessary to do like Dickens—get out on the platform and read from the book. I did that, and made a botch of it. Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue—where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized, and turned into the common forms of unpremeditated talk—otherwise they will bore the house, not entertain it. After a week’s experience with the book I laid it aside and never carried it to the platform again; but meantime I had memorized those pieces, and in delivering them from the platform they soon transformed themselves into flexible talk, with all their obstructing precisenesses and formalities gone out of them for good.

One of the readings which I used was a part of an extravagant chapter, in dialect, from “Roughing It” which I entitled “His Grandfather’s Old Ram.”Ⓔexplanatory note After I had memorized it it began to undergo changes on the platform, and it continued to edit and revise itself, night after night, until,Ⓐtextual note by and by, from dreading to begin on it before an audience I came to like itⒶtextual note and enjoy it. I never knew how considerable the changes had been when I finished the season’s work; I never knew until ten or eleven years later, when I took up that book in a parlor in New York one night to read that chapter to a dozen friends of the two sexes who had asked for it. It wouldn’t read Ⓐtextual note—that is, it wouldn’t read aloud. [begin page 167] I struggled along with it for five minutes, and then gave it up and said I should have to tell the tale as best I might from memory. It turned out that my memory was equal to the emergency; it reproduced the platform form of the story pretty faithfully, after that interval of years. I still remember that form of it, I think, and I wish to recite it here, so that the reader may compare it with the story as told in “Roughing It,” if he pleases, and note how different the spoken version is from the written and printed version.

The idea of the tale is to exhibit certain bad effects of a good memory; the sort of memory which is too good; which remembers everything and forgets nothing; which has no sense of proportion, and can’t tell an important event from an unimportant one, but preserves them all, states them all, and thus retards the progress of a narrative, at the same time making a tangled, inextricable confusion of it and intolerably wearisome to the listener. The historian of “His Grandfather’s Old Ram” had that kind of a memory. He often tried to communicate that history to his comrades, the other surface miners, but he could never complete it, because his memory defeated his every attempt to march a straight course; it persistently threw remembered details in his way that had nothing to do with the tale; these unrelated details would interest him and sidetrackⒶtextual note him; if he came across a name, or a family, or any other thing that had nothing to do with his tale, he would diverge from his course to tell about the person who owned that name, or explain all about that family—with the result that as he plodded on he always got further and further from his grandfather’s memorable adventure with the ramⒶtextual note; and finallyⒶtextual note went to sleep before he got to the end of the story,Ⓐtextual note and so did his comrades. Once he did manage to approach so nearly to the end, apparently, that the boys were filled with an eager hope; they believed that at last they were going to find out all about the grandfather’s adventure and what it was that had happened. After the usual preliminaries, the historian said:

“Well, as I was a-sayin’, he bought that old ram from a feller up in Siskiyou County and fetched him home and turned him loose in the medder, and next morning he went down to have a look at him, and accident’lyⒶtextual note dropped a ten-cent piece in the grass and stooped down—so—and was a-fumblin’ around in the grass to git it, and the ram he was a-standin’ up the slope taking notice; but my grandfather wasn’t taking notice, because he had his back to the ram and was int’rested about the dime. Well, there he was, as I was a-sayin’, down at the foot of the slope a-bendin’ a-way over—so—fumblin’ in the grass, and the ram he was up there at the top of the slope, and Smith—Smith was a-standin’ there—no, not jest there, a little further away—fifteen foot perhaps—well, my grandfather was a-stoopin’ ’wayⒶtextual note down—so—and the ram was up there observing, you know, and Smith he . . . . . . . (musing) . . . . . the ram he bent his head down, so . . . . . . . Smith of Calaveras . . . . . no, no it couldn’t ben Smith of Calaveras—I remember now that he—b’ GeorgeⒶtextual note it was Smith of Tulare County—course it was, I remember it now perfectly plain. Well,Ⓐtextual note Smith he stood just there, and my grandfather he stood just [begin page 168] here, you know, and he was a-bendin’ down just so, fumblin’ in the grass, and when the old ram see him in that attitude he took it furⒶtextual note an invitation—and here he come!Ⓐtextual note down the slope thirty mile an hour and his eye full of business. You see my grandfather’s back being to him, and him stooping down like that, of course he—why sho! it warn’t Ⓐtextual note Smith of Tulare at all, it was Smith of Sacramento—Ⓐtextual notemy goodness, how did I ever come to get them Smiths mixed like that—why, Smith of Tulare was jest a nobody, but Smith of Sacramento—why the Smiths of Sacramento come of the best Southern blood in the United States; there warn’t ever any better blood south of the line than the Sacramento Smiths. Why look here, one of them married a Whitaker! I reckon that gives you an idea of the kind of society the Sacramento Smiths could ’sociate around in; there ain’t no better blood than that Whitaker blood; I reckon anybody’ll tell you that. Look at Mariar Whitaker—there was a girl for you! Little? Why yes, she was little, but what of that? Look at the heart of her—had a heart like a bullock—just as good and sweet and lovely and generous as the day is long; if she had a thing and you wanted it, you could have it—have it and welcome; why Mariar Whitaker couldn’t have a thing and another person need it and not get it—get it and welcome. She had a glass eye, and she used to lend it to Flora Ann Baxter that hadn’t any, to receive company with; well, she was pretty large, and it didn’t fit; it was a No.Ⓐtextual note 7, and she was excavated for a 14, and soⒶtextual note that eye wouldn’t lay still; every time she winked it would turn over. It was a beautiful eye and set her off admirable, because it was a lovely pale blue on the front side—the side youⒶtextual note look out of—and it was gilded on the back side; didn’t match the other eye, which was one of them browny-yelleryⒶtextual note eyes and tranquil and quiet, you know, the way that kind of eyes are; but that warn’t any matter—they worked together all right and plenty picturesque. When Flora Ann winked, that blue and gilt eye would whirl over, and the other one stand still, and as soon as she begun to get excited that hand-made eye would give a whirl and then go on a-whirlin’ and a-whirlin’Ⓐtextual note faster and faster, and a-flashing first blue and then yaller and then blue and then yaller, and when it got to whizzing and flashing like that, the oldest man in the world couldn’t keep up with the expression on that side of her face. FloraⒶtextual note Ann Baxter married a Hogadorn. I reckon that lets you understand what kind of blood she was—old Maryland Eastern Shore blood; not a better family in the United States than the Hogadorns. Sally—that’s Sally Hogadorn—Sally married a missionary, and they went off carrying the good news to the cannibals out in one of them way-off islands round the world in the middle of the ocean somers, and they et her; et him too, which was irregular; it warn’t the custom to eat the missionary, but only the family, and when they see what they had done they was dreadful sorry about it, and when the relations sent down there to fetch away the things they said so—said so right out—said they was sorry, and ’pologized, and said it shouldn’t happen again; said ’twas an accident. Accident! now that’sⒶtextual note foolishness; there ain’t no such thing as an accident; there ain’t nothing happens in the world but what’s ordered just so by a wiser Power than us, and it’s always furⒶtextual note a good purpose; we don’t know what the good purpose was, sometimes—and it was the same with the families that was short a missionary and his wife. But that ain’t no matter, and it ain’t any of our business; all that concerns us is that it [begin page 169] was a special providence and it had a good intention. No sir, there ain’t no such thing as an accident. Whenever a thing happens that you thinkⒶtextual note is an accident you make up your mind it ain’t no accident at all—it’s a special providence. You look at my Uncle Lem—what do you say to that? That’s all I ask you—you just look at my Uncle Lem and talk to me about accidents! It was like this: one day my Uncle Lem and his dog was down town, and he was a-leanin’ up against a scaffolding—sick, or drunk, or somethin’—and there was an Irishman with a hod of bricks up the ladder along about the third story, and his foot slipped and down he come, bricks and all, and hit a stranger fair and square and knocked the everlasting aspirations out of him; he was ready for the coroner in two minutes. Now then people said it was an accident. Accident! there warn’t no accident about it; ’twas a special providence, and had a mysterious, noble intention back of it. The idea was to save that Irishman. If the stranger hadn’t been there that Irishman would have been killed. The people said ‘specialⒶtextual note providence—sho! the dog was there—why didn’t the Irishman fall on the dog? Why warn’t the dog app’inted?Ⓐtextual note’ Fer a mighty good reason—the dog would ’a’Ⓐtextual note seen him a-comingⒶtextual note; you can’t depend on no dog to carry out a special providence. You couldn’t hit a dog with an Irishman because—lemme see, what was that dog’s name . . . . . (musing) . . . . . . . oh yes, Jasper—and a mighty good dog too; he wa’n’t no common dog, he wa’n’t no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that’s made up of all the valuable qualities that’s in the dog breed—kind of aⒶtextual note syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of the riffraffⒶtextual note that’s left over. That Jasper was one of the most wonderful dogs you ever see. Uncle Lem got him of the Wheelers. I reckon you’ve heard of the Wheelers; ain’t no better blood south of the line than the Wheelers. Well, one day Wheeler was a-meditatingⒶtextual note and dreaming around in the carpet factory and the machinery made a snatch at him and first you know he was a-meanderingⒶtextual note all over that factory, from the garret to the cellar, and everywhere, at such another gaitⒶtextual note as—why, you couldn’t even see him; you could only hear him whiz when he went by. Well you know a person can’t go through an experience like that and arrive back home the way he was when he went. No, Wheeler got wove up into thirty-nine yards of best three-ply carpeting. The widder was sorry, she was uncommon sorry, and loved him and done the best she could fur him in the circumstances, which was unusual. She took the whole piece—thirty-nine yards, and sheⒶtextual note wanted to give him proper and honorable burial, but she couldn’t bear to roll him up; she took and spread him out full length,Ⓐtextual note and said she wouldn’t have it any other way. She wanted to buy a tunnel for him but there wasn’t any tunnel for sale, so she boxed him in a beautiful box and stood it on the hill on a pedestal twenty-one footⒶtextual note high, and so it was monument and grave together, and economical—sixty foot high—you could see it from everywhere—and she painted on it ‘To the loving memory of thirty-nine yards best three-ply carpeting containing the mortal remainders of Millington G. Wheeler go thou and do likewise.’ ”

At this point the historian’s voice began to wobbleⒶtextual note and his eyelids to droop with weariness, and he fell asleep; and so from that day to this we are still in ignorance; we don’t know whether the old grandfather ever got the ten-cent piece out of the grass; we haven’t any idea what it was that happened, or whether anything happened at all.

Upon comparing the above with the original in “Roughing It,” I find myself unable to clearly and definitely explain why the one can be effectively recited before an audience and the other can’t; there is a reason, but it is too subtle for adequate conveyance by the lumbering vehicle of words; I sense it, but cannot express it; it is as elusive as an odor—pungent, pervasive, but defying analysis. I give it up. I merely know that the one version will recite, and the other won’t.

By reciting I mean, of course, delivery from memory; neither version can be read effectively from the book. There are plenty of good reasons why this should be so, but there is one reason which is sufficient by itself, perhaps: in reading from the book you are telling another person’s tale at second-hand; you are a mimic, and not the person involved; you are an artificiality, not a reality—whereas in telling the tale without the book you absorb the character and presently become theⒶtextual note man himself, just as is the case with the actor. The greatest actor would not be able to carry his audience by storm with a book in his hand; readingⒶtextual note from the book renders the nicest shadings of delivery impossible—I mean those studied fictions which seem to be the impulse of the moment, and which are so effective: such as, for instance, fictitious hesitancies for the right word; fictitious unconscious pauses; fictitious unconscious side remarks; fictitious unconscious embarrassments; fictitious unconscious emphases placed upon the wrong word, with a deep intention back of it—these, and all the other artful fictive shades which give to a recited tale the captivating naturalness of an impromptu narration, can be attempted by a book reader, and are attempted, but they are easily detectable as artifice, and although the audience may admire their cleverness and their ingenuity as artifice, they only get at the intellect of the house, they don’t get at its heart; and so the reader’s success lacks a good deal of being complete.

When a man is reading from a book, on the platform, he soon realizes that there is one powerful gun in his battery of artifice that he can’t work with an effect proportionate to its calibreⒶtextual note: that is the pause Ⓐtextual note—that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words howsoever felicitous could accomplish it. The pause is not of much use to the man who is reading from a book, because he cannot know what the exact length of it ought to be; he is not the one to determine the measurement—the audience must do that for him; he must perceive by their faces when the pause has reached the proper length, but his eyes are not on the faces, they are on the book; therefore he must determine the proper length of the pause by guess; he cannot guess with exactness, and nothing but exactness, absolute exactness, will answer. The man who recites without the book has all the advantage; when he comes to an oldⒶtextual note familiar remark in his tale which he has uttered nightly for a hundred nights—a remark preceded or followed by a pause—the faces of the audience tell him when to end the pause. For one audience, the pause will be short; for another a little longer; for another a shade longer still; the performer must vary the length of the pause to suit the shades of difference between audiences. These [begin page 171] variations of measurement are so slight, so delicate, that they may almost be compared with the shadings achieved by Pratt and Whitney’s ingenious machine which measures the five-millionth part of an inchⒺexplanatory note. An audience is that machine’s twin; it can measure a pause down to that vanishing fraction.

I used to play with the pause as other children play with a toy. In my recitals, when I went reading around the world for the benefit of Mr. Webster’s creditorsⒺexplanatory note, I had three or four pieces in which the pausesⒶtextual note performed an important part, and I used to lengthen them or shorten them according to the requirements of the case, and I got much pleasure out of the pause when it was accurately measured, and a certain discomfort when it wasn’t. In the negro ghost story of “The Golden Arm” one of these pauses occurs just in front of the closing remark. Whenever I got the pause the right length, the remark that followed it was sure of a satisfactorily startling effect, but if the length of the pause was wrong by the five-millionth of an inch, the audience had had time in that infinitesimal fraction of a moment to wake up from its deep concentration in the grisly tale and foresee the climax, and be prepared for it before it burst upon them—and so it fell flat. In Susy’s little Biography of me she tells about my proceeding to tell this ghost tale to the multitude of young lady students at Vassar College—a tale which poor Susy always dreaded—and she tells how this time she gathered her fortitude together and was resolved that she wouldn’t be startled; and how all her preparations were of no avail; and how,Ⓐtextual note when the climax fell,Ⓐtextual note that multitude of girls “jumpedⒶtextual note as one man”Ⓐtextual note—which is an indication that I had the pause rightly measured that timeⒺexplanatory note.

In the “Grandfather’s Old Ram” a pause has place; it follows a certain remark, and Mrs. Clemens and Clara, when we were on our way around the world, would afflict themselves with my whole performance every night, when there was no sort of necessity for it, in order that they might watch the house when that pause came; they believed that by the effect they could accurately measure the high or low intelligence of the audience. I knew better, but it was not in my interest to say so. When the pause was right, the effect was sure; when the pause was wrong in length, by the five-millionth of an inch, the laughter was only mild, never a crash. That passage occurs in “His Grandfather’s Old Ram” where the question under discussion is whether the falling of the Irishman on the stranger was an accident,Ⓐtextual note or wasⒶtextual note a special providence. If it was a special providence, and if the sole purpose of it was to save the Irishman, why was it necessary to sacrifice the stranger? “The dog was there. Why didn’t he fall on the dog?Ⓐtextual note Why wa’n’t the dog app’inted?Ⓐtextual note Becuz the dog would ’a’ seen him a-comin’ Ⓐtextual note.” That last remark was the one the family waited for. A pause after Ⓐtextual note the remark was absolutely necessary with any and all audiences, because no man, howsoever intelligent he may be, can instantly adjust his mind to a new and unfamiliar, and yet for a moment or two apparently plausible, logic which recognizes in a dog an instrument too indifferent to pious restraints and too alert in looking out for his own personal interest to be safely depended upon in an emergency requiring self-sacrifice for the benefit of another, even when the command comes from on high. The absurdity of the situation always worked its way into the audience’s mind, but it had to have time.Ⓐtextual note