The London theaters are almost absolutely empty these nights. Nobody goes, hardly. The managers are being ruined. The streets for miles are crammed with people waiting whole long hours for a chance glimpse of the Shah. I never saw any man “draw” like this one. Is there any truth in the report that your bureaus are trying to get the Shah to go over there and lecture? He could get $100,000 a night here and choose his own subject. I know a showman who has got a pill that belonged to him, and which for some reason he did not take. That showman will not take any money for that pill. He is going to travel with it. And let me tell you he will get more engagements than he can fill in a year. IV MARK TWAIN HOOKS THE PERSIAN OUT OF THE ENGLISH CHANNEL LONDON, _June 26, 1873_. I suppose I am the only member of the Shah’s family who is not wholly broken down and worn out; and, to tell the truth, there is not much of me left. If you have ever been limited to four days in Paris or Rome or Jerusalem and been “rushed” by a guide you can form a vague, far-away sort of conception of what the Shah and the rest of us have endured during these late momentous days. If this goes on we may as well get ready for the imperial inquest. When I was called at five o’clock the other morning to go to Portsmouth, and remembered that the Shah’s incessant movements had left me only three hours’ sleep that night, nothing but a sense of duty drove me forth. A cab could not be found, nor a carriage in all London. I lost an hour and a half waiting and trying, then started on foot and lost my way; consequently I missed one train by a good while, another one by three minutes, and then had more than half an hour to spare before another would go. Most people had had a similar experience, and there was comfort in that. We started at last, and were more than three hours going seventy-two miles. We stopped at no stations, hardly, but we halted every fifteen minutes out in the woods and fields for no purpose that we could discover. Never was such an opportunity to look at scenery. There were five strangers in our car, or carriage, as the English call it, and by degrees their English reserve thawed out and they passed around their sherry and sandwiches and grew sociable.