He said he was working the newspapers—keeping them quiet, so’t they would begin to talk presently. Which they didn’t. And he said they would talk after the lecture, too. I was afraid of that myself.

On the eighth day I was in a panic—for that deadly calm held on as solidly as ever. I couldn’t hear a whisper anywhere about my lecture. Fuller said, don’t worry—look at these; you’ll see what these will do. They were little handbills the size of your hand, all display headings full of extravagant laudations of my celebrity and my lecture, and names of the illustrious people who were going to be there. He didn’t say how many of them he had had printed, but there were 13 barrels of them. They were tied together in bunches of 50, with a string that had a loop to it. He had them hung up in the omnibuses and horse-cars, and also on all the door-knobs in town. I could not rest, I was too miserable, too distressed, too sad, too hopeless. I rode in omnibuses all that day, up and down Broadway, and watched those bunches of lies dangling from the cleats, crick in back of my neck from looking up, all day. But nobody ever took one; and gradually my heart broke. At least nobody took one till late in the afternoon. Then a man pulled one down and read it, and made me happy. His friend spoke up and asked Who is Mark Twain? and he said God knows—I don’t.

These things seem funny, now, after 30 years; much funnier than they did then. But then the development of the humor of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes.

I did not ride any more. I went to Fuller and said the case is absolutely desperate. There isn’t going to be a soul at the lecture—you must paper the house—you must load up every bench in it with dead-head tickets.

It made him sad to hear me talk so. He said “there was going to be $3,000 in it and $40,000 outside trying to get in—but your comfort is the first thing to be considered, and it shall be as you say. And I will give you the very best and brainiest dead-head audience that ever sat down under a roof in this world—both sexes, and every last one of them a school-teacher.” And straightway he began to send out market-baskets loaded with dead-head tickets. He fairly snowed the public schools under with them, north, south and west for 30 miles around New York. Then I felt better.

On the ninth and tenth days, we began to hear from the illustrious men who had been invited.

[A succession on the screen, here, of good portraits of the time, beginning with Grant and ending with Nye—with explanations of why they couldn’t be present. Then portraits of the time, of Fuller and me. Then of us as at present; and then or at the end Fuller must come on and say he noticed, as I went along, that some of the things I said were true.]

The lecture was to begin at 8. I was nervous, and I went a little early. It was just as well that I did. Massed in the street were all the school teachers in America, apparently, and more coming. The streets were blocked, all traffic was at a standstill. It took me a while to get in.