As he explained, he “never liked to make a speech without preparation, because it was impossible to tell what kind of iniquity he might wander into on an empty stomach—that is, mind.” But the pressure was too much for him. He had come to be the guest of honor and have the privilege of talking to all the college women individually.

There he stood at the head of the long drawing-room of the club-house on Madison Square North, with Miss Maida Castelhun, the President, a vision in black jetted lace over blue silk, to support him on the right—and the support was quite literal at times. Miss Cutting, of Vassar, in white, was at his left to make the introductions, while Miss Hervy, of the Entertainment Committee, fed Mr. Clemens’s drooping energies with occasional tid-bits from the refreshment room, and kept a vigilant eye out for “repeaters” among those who greeted him.

Fed Him Charlottes.

It was a beautiful sight to see Miss Hervy’s tall figure, the tail of her light gray gown thrown over her arm, bearing down through the throng like a ship under full sail with a charlotte russe held aloft in a white gloved hand.

“Mr. Clemens must have this before he says another word,” she would exclaim and the line halted while the humorist meekly devoured her offering. He shamelessly encouraged the repeaters.

“I met a lady I had seen the other day at Vassar,” he said, as he held a Vassar hand, “and found I had to construct things all over again, for she is now a grandmother. Perhaps I am seeing some of her grand-daughters now. It is terrible mixing, you know.”

Some of them declared they had waited for this moment all their lives. One whispered as she passed:

“I don’t have to say anything, do I?”

“No,” replied Mr. Clemens, “I’m shy about that sort of thing, myself.”

“Won’t you tell the Blue Jay story?”

“I’ve been brought up on ‘Tom Sawyer.’”

“Won’t you do us another ‘Prince and the Pauper’” were some of the speeches hailed upon him.

One Touch of Nature.

But the best was the little freshman who rushed up with dancing eyes, gave his hand an energetic squeeze and asked:

“Say, have you had an ice in there?—they’re perfectly fine.”

When Mark Twain promised to “yarn” for them, a small platform was brought in.

“But I want a chair,” he said. “I can’t see what you are doing out there.”

A dozen hands were extended to help him up and he told the story of Twichell and himself, when for three hours and a half he hunted for a lost sock in the desert of a German bedroom “like a modern Sahara.”

Then he sat down on his chair and the girls grouped themselves at his feet.

It is evident that this reporter was there. He didn’t see everything, and he didn’t hear everything, but he saw and heard the most of the show, and he saw and heard with considerable accuracy, too. He is right when he says I have the college-girl habit. I was never without it. Susy’s Biography shows, incidentally, that I had it twenty years ago and more. I had it earlier than that, as Smith College can testify. That Vassar episode was damaged by that old goat who was President there at the time, but nothing can ever damage the lovely vision of the Vassar girls of that mixed delightful and devilish day. It was a lovely vision, and it does not fade out of my memory.

Day before yesterday all Vassar, ancient and modern, packed itself into the Hudson Theatre, and I was there. The occasion was a benefit arranged by Vassar and its friends to raise money to aid poor students of that College in getting through the college course. I was not aware that I was to be a feature of the show, and was distressed and most uncomfortably inflamed with blushes when I found it out. Really the distress and the blushes were manufactured, for at bottom I was glad. When the ladies started to lead me through the house to the stage, when the performance was over, I was so coy that everybody admired, and was moved by it. I do things like that with an art that deceives even the hardened and experienced cynic. It has taken me a long time and has cost me much practice to perfect myself in that art, but it was worth the trouble. It makes me the most winning old thing that ever went among confiding girls. I held a reception on that stage for an hour or two, and all Vassar, ancient and modern, shook hands with me. Some of the moderns were too beautiful for words, and I was very friendly with those. I was so hoping somebody would want to kiss me for my mother, but I didn’t dare to suggest it myself. Presently, however, when it happened, I did what I could to make it contagious, and succeeded. This required art, but I had it in stock. I seemed to take the old and the new as they came, without discrimination, but I averaged the percentage to my advantage, and without anybody’s suspecting, I think.

Among that host I met again as many as half a dozen pretty old girls whom I had met in their bloom at Vassar that time that Susy and I visited the College so long ago. Yesterday, at the University Club, almost all the five hundred were of the young and lovely, untouched by care, unfaded by age. There were girls there from Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe, Vassar and Barnard, together with a sprinkling of college girls from the South, from the Middle West and the Pacific coast.

I delivered a moral sermon to the Barnard girls at Columbia University a few weeks ago, and now it was like being among old friends. There were dozens of Barnard girls there, scores of them, and I had already shaken hands with them at Barnard. As I have said, the reporter heard many things there yesterday, but there were several which he didn’t hear. One sweet creature wanted to whisper in my ear, and I was nothing loth. She raised her dainty form on tiptoe, lifting herself with a grip of her velvet hands on my shoulders and put her lips to my ear and said “How do you like being the belle of New York?” It was so true, and so gratifying, that it crimsoned me with blushes, and I could make no reply. The reporter lost that.

Two girls, one from Maine, the other from Ohio, were grandchildren of fellow-passengers who sailed with me in the Quaker City in the “Innocents Abroad” excursion thirty-nine years ago.