“And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four --not more than that--I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann' --fourteen hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all the other twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and laden with a rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken to a wandering alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days multiplied by five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from Canton--homeward bound!” Says “Charles Vale,” in describing the scene “The audience sat spellbound in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no longer; and when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out the words: 'I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from Canton,' there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the room to the other. It seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it upset the orator: yet it was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after a long pause, came the last two words--like that curious, detached and high note in which a great piece of music suddenly ends--'Homeward bound.' Again there was a cheer: but this time it was lower; it was subdued; it was the fitting echo to the beautiful words--with their double significance--the parting from a hospitable land, the return to the native land. . . . Only a great litterateur could have conceived such a passage: only a great orator could have so delivered it.”