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172. Savage Club
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572 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 172 · The Savage Club dinner introduced something new in entertainment. Louis Brennan, an inventor, demonstrated his monorail car, sending a six-foot model on wire cables swooping around the room, in and out among diners and wine bottles, to the great delight of Mark Twain. Always fascinated by mechanical devices, he enjoyed the show immensely. He wasfurther pleased to be presented with a portrait of himself signed by all the members of the Savage Club. To climax the evening, he was handed a note from one of his "confederates" involved in the theft of the Ascot Cup, together with a package containing a facsimile ofthe trophy, on the top ofwhich was a small wooden likeness ofMark Twain. The confederate said: "I changed the acorn atopfor another nut with my knife." See MTB, 4:1400. Dinner Speech Savage Club Dinnerfor Mark Twain, London,july 6,1907 Mr. Chairman and fellow Savages: I am very glad indeed to have that portrait. I think it is the best one that I have ever had, and there have been opportunities before to get a good photograph. I have sat to photographers twenty-two times today. Those sittings added to those that have preceded them since I have been in England-if we average at that rate-must have numbered one hundred to two hundred sittings. Out of all those there ought to be some good photographs. This is the best I have had, and I am glad to have your honored names on it. I did not know Harold Frederic personally, but I have heard a great deal about him, and nothing that was not pleasant, and nothing except such things as lead a man to honor another man and to love him. I consider that it is a misfortune of mine that I have never had the luck to meet him, and ifany book of mine read to him in his last hours made those hours easier for him and more comfortable, I am very glad and proud of that. I call to mind such a case, many years ago, ofan English authoress, well known in her day, who wrote beautiful child tales, touching and lovely in every way. In a little biographical sketch ofher I found that her last hours were spent partly in reading a book of mine, MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 573 until she was no longer able to read. That has always remained in my mind, and I have always cherished it as one of the good things of my life. I had read what she had written, and had loved her for what she had done. Stanley, apparently, carried a book of mine feloniously away to Africa, and I have not a doubt that it had a noble and uplifting influence there in the wilds of Africa-because on his previous journeys he never carried anything to read except Shakespeare and the Bible. I did not know of that circumstance. I did not know that he had carried a book of mine. I only noticed that when he came back he was a reformed man. I knew Stanley very well in those old days. Stanley was the first man who ever reported a lecture of mine, and that was in St. Louis for one of the papers there. When I was down there the next time to give the same lecture I was told to give them something fresh, as they had read that before in the papers. I met Stanley here when he came back from that first expedition of his which closed with the finding of Livingstone. You remember how he would break out at the meetings of the British Association, and find fault with what people said, because Stanley had notions of his own, and could not contain them. They had to come out, or break him up-and so he would go round and address geographical societies, and he was always on the warpath in those days, and people always had to have Stanley contradicting their geography for them and improving it. But he always came back and sat drinking beer with me in the hotel up to two in the morning, and he was one of the most civilized human beings that ever was. I saw in the Westminster Gazette this evening a reference to an interview which appeared in one of the papers the other day, in which the interviewer said that I characterized Mr. Birrell's speech the...