Charles Warren Stoddard is another name which pleasantly connects itself with those days of emergence. There are few parts of the civilized globe over which “dear Charlie”—as his intimates called him—has not trotted. He lived the absolutely “natural life” in the South Seas. The result of that enervating experience may be seen in two very delightful books, “South Sea Idylls,” published over thirty years ago, and “The Island of Tranquil Delights,” published in this country a couple of years since. He travelled all over Europe, joining a monastic brotherhood at Rome. This he quitted after a few years’ experience, his memories of tropical islands, perhaps, engendering a hankering after the fleshpots. On one of the Pyramids he met Williamson the actor—to become in the fulness of time Williamson the successful Australian manager—and on the tomb of the Pharaohs he gave Williamson an introduction to me, which led to a very delightful acquaintanceship. From a Japanese poet named Noguki, who recently produced a wonderful book of verse in London, I heard that he had met Stoddard in Tokio, and that he was then on his way to take up a Chair of English Literature at a University in Washington. But he must have wandered away from that place of safety, for I next heard of him as having escaped by the skin of his teeth from the awful seismic disaster in San Francisco. You don’t want much money in a monastery, and you probably get enough to live on while teaching English literature to the youth of the United States. But, deducting these two brief periods of retirement from wandering, Stoddard must have moved around, surveying the wonders of the world, on an income entirely derived from fugitive articles in the papers of California. Stoddard brought me to see Mark Twain at the Langham Hotel. The two men were great friends, and, indeed, I believe that some of the descriptive touches in the lectures delivered in London by Twain were “written in” by Stoddard. It was a fearfully foggy afternoon on which we made our call. Twain was walking up and down his sitting-room, evidently in a low key. The sight of Stoddard, however, cheered him. He pointed to a table at the end of the room, on which were ranged, in vast quantities, the materials necessary for the compounding of cocktails, and begged us to help ourselves. When we had got our medicine “fixed”—an operation which our host kindly undertook for me—Stoddard asked suddenly: “Say, Clemens, what have you done with your shorthand writer?” “Shot him,” replied Twain grimly. “You don’t say!” exclaimed Stoddard. “I shot him out into the fog. He couldn’t hurt the fog much. Another ten minutes of him would have killed _me_.”