His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played this rôle in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the sort of courage he described in his story "Luck."