I had been on a holiday to New England with my friend John D. Barry, and had just come from Maine where I had spent a week at Kittery Point, in the delight of long summer afternoons in the company of Mr. William Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my reverence for him, I had gone there to see. He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less in intensity I am sure than those with which Moses came down out of Mount Horeb. And Steffens and I celebrated them and their writings and that quality of right-mindedness they both got into their writings, and we had our joy in their perfect Americanism. The word had a definite meaning for us; it occurred to us at that time because of some tremendous though unavailing blows which Mark Twain had delivered against our government’s policy in the Philippines, the time falling in that era of khaki imperialism which opened in this land with the Spanish war and too much reading of Kipling, who, if I could bring myself to think that literature has any influence in America, might be said to have induced us to imitate England in her colonial policy. There comes back the picture of Mark Twain as he sat on the veranda of the home he had that summer at Sewell’s Bridge, a cottage on a hill all hidden among the pines; he sat there in his picturesque costume of white trousers and blue jacket, with his splendid plume of white hair, and he smoked cigar after cigar--he was an “end to end smoker” as George Ade says--and as he sat and smoked he drawled a delightful monologue about some of his experiences with apparitions and telepathy and that weird sort of thing; he said they were not to be published during his life, and since his death I have been waiting to see them in print. He had just been made a Doctor of Laws by some university in June of that year, a distinguishing fact known to a caller from the fashionable resort of York near by, who, though somewhat hazy as to Mark Twain’s performances in literature, nevertheless scrupulously addressed him as “Doctor,” and every time he was thus recognized in his new and scholarly dignity, he winked at us from under his shaggy brows. Perhaps that was part of his Americanism, too, unless it were a part of that universality which made him the great humorist he was, and philosopher, too; an universality that makes Mr. Howells a humorist as well as a novelist and a philosopher--the elements are scarcely inseparable--though Mr. Howells’s humor is of a more delicate quality than that of his great friend, and, as one might say, colleague, a quality so rare and delicate and delightful that some folk seem to miss it altogether. Perhaps it was the Americanism of these two great men and their democracy that have won them such recognition in Europe, where they have represented the best that is in us.