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[246] === From One Afternoon with Mark Twain (1939) George Ade The American humorist and journalist George Ade (1866–1944) remembered a visit with Twain in 1902 in company with Clarence C. Rice (1855–1935), a family friend and the Clemens family physician. it was in the late summer or early autumn of 1902, as nearly as I can fix the date, when Dr. Clarence C. Rice, a long-time friend and travelingcompanion of Mark Twain’s, came to me at my hotel in New York City and invited me to accompany him on a pilgrimage to the One and Only. Of course I accepted the invitation. Probably no person then alive and gifted with a pair of movable legs would have done otherwise. And especially so myself. For a good many years I had been waiting and hoping to meet Mark Twain. I think I had read everything he ever wrote. With great admiration and respect I had witnessed his “comeback” in the early nineties , during which he repaid a mountainous debt as a matter of honor, not of personal legal responsibility. How unappreciative we often are, at the time, of the red-letter days in our lives! I cannot say that I was not impressed with the importance of the invitation to visit Mark Twain. I certainly was. But what was in my mind at the time was the belief that he would live for many more years; and that, having met him on this occasion with Dr. Rice, I would later visit him alone and at greater length. My recollection is that I planned to have the next visit take the form of a newspaperman’s interview. I knew that such an article would be in ready demand at a good price. But it was not the money I wanted; it was the honor of having written an article about Mark Twain, all-time Dean of American Literature, commanding figure in this country and throughout the world. Kipling had done a fine job of his interview with Twain in Elmira in 1890, as published in From Sea to Sea in 1899.1 Probably I was just enough conceited in those days to make a try at outdoing Kipling. I can’t remember as to this. Time mercifully blots from our memories any of the follies of early life. [247] Although, at that time, I was regarded in some quarters as being a bit of a humorist myself, I do definitely recall that I had no thought of conferring with Mark Twain as a fellow fun-maker. Beside his towering fame, my own stature was something like that of a child’s mud-pie man, placed alongside the statue of Rodin’s “Thinker.” And thus it happened that I made no notes recording the details of the most momentous meeting of my life. I went; I saw and heard; I came away. The tragic events of the few remaining years of Mark Twain’s life made it impossible for me ever to talk with him again. I never wrote that masterpiece of an interview I was going to write. I have never before set down on paper the few impressions of our one meeting that still remain fixed in my mind. Yes, if I had known that I was never again to meet Mark Twain, I would have come provided with a handful of pencils and my pockets bulging with copy paper. I would have carefully recorded the date, the state of the weather—every word he spoke, every trifling detail of that pilgrimage to the shrine of this immortal American. Vaguely, I can recall that Dr. Rice and I journeyed up the Hudson by rail and alighted at a station which should have been named Riverdale. I was being escorted by Dr. Rice and paid little attention to the route. I don’t even remember what kind of a vehicle it was that met us at the station and carried us up to a delightful, rambling, homey-looking old house on a hillside , surrounded by huge, wide-branching trees. He stood alone on the porch, waiting to greet us. I can recall that he wore a white or tan-colored suit, loose and comfortable-looking, but not ill-fitting. From the moment that he took my hand in his firm clasp, he was the soul of kindliness, cordiality, and affability. I can recall only his eyes. I lack words to describe them. Probably the word “imperious” comes close...

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