story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of foreign missions. So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that, after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out for any amount. But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the minister was inexhaustible--and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign missions slowly oozed away--one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even lower still--so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put in ten cents and took out a quarter! I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast, spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the English people. One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect example of that masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity, with which Mark Twain was endowed. At the banquet presided over by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell to the English people, his peroration was as follows: “Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small grandeurs. One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and romantic creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of precious spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of the Orient. Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the shrouds and squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy! What ship is that, and whence and whither?' In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back, through a speaking trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from Canton homeward bound! What ship is that?' The little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most humbly he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary Ann--fourteen hours from Boston, bound for Kittery Point with--with nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word 'only' expressed the deeps of his stricken humbleness.