As a born actor, he understood the necessity of preparation and rehearsal. He left nothing to chance. He knew how his effects ought to be made; and he knew how to make them. Even his seemingly spontaneous after-dinner speeches were thought out and worked out, in every minutest detail of inflection and hesitation. In his ‘How to Tell a Story’ he insisted that the total impression of his hair-raising ghost-story, the ‘Golden Arm,’ depended upon the exact calculation of a certain pause; and I can testify that on the only occasion I had the pleasure of hearing him tell the gruesome tale—one summer evening in 1890 at Onteora, in a cabin dimly lit by a flickering wood fire—the pause was long enough to be almost unbearable. He stood in no fear of an audience, because he had an imperturbable self-confidence, rooted in a knowledge of his certain power of impressing all who came within sound of his voice. Moreover, he possessed to the end of his life the boyish delight in being conspicuous that he ascribed to Tom Sawyer. It is true that he was diffident before he had proved himself as a lecturer; and in a little speech he made after a musical recital given by his daughter in 1906, he described his trepidation when he was about to make his first appearance before an audience: I had stage-fright then for the first and last time.... After the first agonizing five minutes, my stage-fright left me, never to return. I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make a good showing—and I intend to. When he was living in Hartford he often took part in private theatricals, the other performers being members of his own household. After a performance of a dramatization of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ by the children of the Educational Alliance in 1907, he was called upon for a speech and he told the thousand little spectators that he had himself acted the part of Miles Hendon twenty-two years earlier. One of his daughters had been the Prince and the daughter of a neighbor was the Pauper. Mrs. Clemens was the dramatist and stage-manager. “Our coachman was the assistant stage-manager, second in command.” He had many friends among stage-folk, authors, actors and managers. He accepted the invitation to make the opening address at the Actors’ Fund Fair in 1907. He lent William Gillette the money which enabled that veracious actor to start his career. He once gave a characteristically amusing account of his success in passing through the sternly defended stage-entrance to Daly’s Theater. At a dinner to Henry Irving in London in June, 1900, he declared that the greatest of all arts is to write a drama. It is a most difficult thing. It requires the highest talents possible and the rarest gifts. No, there is another talent that ranks with it—for anybody can write a drama—I have written about four hundred—but to get one accepted requires real ability. And I have never had that felicity yet.