and hunt up that shop and hand in my hat to have it ironed. I said when
it came back, “How much to pay?” They said, “Ninepence.” In seven years
I have acquired all that worldliness, and I am sorry to be back where I
was seven years ago.
But now I am chaffing and chaffing and chaffing here, and I hope you will
forgive me for that; but when a man stands on the verge of seventy-two
you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing
what this life is heart-breaking bereavement. And so our reverence is
for our dead. We do not forget them; but our duty is toward the living;
and if we can be cheerful, cheerful in spirit, cheerful in speech and in
hope, that is a benefit to those who are around us.
My own history includes an incident which will always connect me with
England in a pathetic way, for when I arrived here seven years ago with
my wife and my daughter–we had gone around the globe lecturing to raise
money to clear off a debt–my wife and one of my daughters started across
the ocean to bring to England our eldest daughter. She was twenty four
years of age and in the bloom of young womanhood, and we were
unsuspecting. When my wife and daughter–and my wife has passed from
this life since–when they had reached mid Atlantic, a cablegram–one of
those heartbreaking cablegrams which we all in our days have to
experience–was put into my hand. It stated that that daughter of ours
had gone to her long sleep. And so, as I say, I cannot always be
cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing; I must sometimes lay the cap
and bells aside, and recognize that I am of the human race like the rest,
and must have my cares and griefs. And therefore I noticed what Mr.
Birrell said–I was so glad to hear him say it–something that was in the
nature of these verses here at the top of this:
He lit our life with shafts of sun
And vanquished pain.
Thus two great nations stand as one
In honoring Twain.”
I am very glad to have those verses. I am very glad and very grateful
for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection. I have received since I
have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions
of people in England–men, women, and children–and there is in them
compliment, praise, and, above all and better than all, there is in them
a note of affection. Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection
–that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can
win, whether by character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have
that reward. All these letters make me feel that here in England–as in
America–when I stand under the English flag, I am not a stranger. I am
not an alien, but at home.
DEDICATION SPEECH
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
MAY 16, 1908
Mr. Clemens wore his gown as Doctor of Laws, Oxford University.
Ambassador Bryce and Mr. Choate had made the formal addresses.
How difficult, indeed, is the higher education. Mr. Choate needs a
little of it. He is not only short as a statistician of New York, but he
is off, far off, in his mathematics. The four thousand citizens of
Greater New York, indeed!
But I don’t think it was wise or judicious on the part of Mr. Choate to
show this higher education he has obtained. He sat in the lap of that
great education (I was there at the time), and see the result–the
lamentable result. Maybe if he had had a sandwich here to sustain him
the result would not have been so serious.
For seventy-two years I have been striving to acquire that higher
education which stands for modesty and diffidence, and it doesn’t work.
And then look at Ambassador Bryce, who referred to his alma mater,
Oxford. He might just as well have included me. Well, I am a later
production.
If I am the latest graduate, I really and sincerely hope I am not the