I don’t pretend to be able to explain the queer noises, nor could George Young, nor Charlie Bell, and Jimmy Bennett would not even speak of them. Whether they were the spirits of the past and gone Indian braves showing their displeasure at our intrusion in their domain, or were caused by some peculiarity in the construction of the house and its environments, I can not offer an opinion. But, as we got accustomed to them, they didn’t disturb us at all, and we got rather proud of our ghostly guests whose board and lodging cost us nothing. CHAPTER X Mark Twain, the Great Humorist—A Delightful Speaker—A Chicago Cub Reporter’s Experience—The Celebrated Cronin Case—W. T. Stead and Hinky Dink—When the Former Wrote “If Christ Came to Chicago.” Mark Twain was, in the minds of a multitude, the greatest humorist that America has ever produced. Some of his works are classics, and he gave that human touch to his characters that endeared them to the hearts of his readers. Although his gifted pen is laid away forever, his writings still live as Dickens’s have lived, his characters are undying. What is more human than his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, his Col. Mulberry Sellars, in the “Gilded Age,” his “Prince and Pauper,” and what works will outlast his Tales of Western Life, and the “Innocents Abroad”? While I could not say that I was at all intimate with Mark, I have met him a number of times, and have heard him speak brilliantly, and also, while suffering great bodily pain, pathetically endeavoring to be his own bright sunshiny self at banquets, when another person similarly stricken in health would have been abed at home or in the hospital. I knew Mark better than many others did, however, through my good friend, Ralph W. Ashcroft, now of Montreal, who for many years was his business manager; his wife, Mrs. Ashcroft, (formerly Miss Lyon) was Mark’s capable secretary. They have a thousand and one recollections of Mark, and could give the world a more realistic insight of the dead author than has ever yet been presented. Few men who ever spoke in public could sway an audience more readily than could Mark Twain. It was a delight to him to play upon the emotions of his hearers, and to transport them in the twinkling of an eye from the verge of tears to the realm of laughter. But I recall two occasions on which his art failed him.