Often during his address he glanced toward the box; but it remained empty. When the affair was ended, he drove home with her father to inquire the reason. They found the little girl, in all her finery, weeping on the bed. Then he remembered he had forgotten to send the carriage; and that was like him, too.
For his Third House address Judge A. W. (Sandy) Baldwin and Theodore Winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to "Governor Mark Twain." He was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was regarded as complete without him. His doings were related daily and his sayings repeated on the streets. Most of these things have passed away now, but a few are still recalled with smiles. Once, when conundrums were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one.
"Well," he sand, "why am I like the Pacific Ocean?"
Several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. Finally all gave it up.
"Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?"
"I don't know," he drawled. "I was just asking for information."
At another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal length, the chorus of which was, "I'm going home, I'm going home, I'm going home tomorrow," Mark Twain put his head in the window and said, pleadingly:
"For God's sake go to-night."
But he was also fond of quieter society. Sometimes, after the turmoil of a legislative morning, he would drop in to Miss Keziah Clapp's school and listen to the exercises, or would call on Colonel Curry--"old Curry, old Abe Curry"--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with Mrs. Curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in 1910), and tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran.
He was a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry's as he came in for rest and refreshment.
"Mrs. Curry," he said once, "I have seen tireder men than I am, and lazier men, but they were dead men." He liked the home feeling there-- the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred.
Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken, who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men--kings, poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken's spell. Dan de Quille and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her his literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home letters, perhaps with a sort of pride.
I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken's wife. She is a literary cuss herself.
She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus:
"My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your manuscript."
But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later, in San Francisco, his "madness" would have seemed to have been allayed.
XLV
A COMSTOCK DUEL
The success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain's ambition for a wider field of labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form.
Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It was just at the time of the "Flour Sack Sanitary Fund," the story of which is related at length in 'Roughing It'. In the general hilarity of this occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle.