Mark Twains Speeches | Page 8

happy
and self- satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. Those majestic guests;
that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened; as did
everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. Well, I delivered
myself of-- we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. I was
expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the
case as regarded the rest of it. I arrived now at the dialogue: "The old
miner said, 'You are the fourth, I'm going to move.' 'The fourth what?'
said I. He answered, 'The fourth littery man that has been here in
twenty- four hours. I am going to move.' 'Why, you don't tell me;' said I.

'Who were the others?' 'Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, consound the lot--'"
Now, then, the house's attention continued, but the expression of
interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the
trouble was. I didn't know. I went on, but with difficulty-- I struggled
along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description of the bogus
Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always hoping
--but with a gradually perishing hope that somebody--would laugh, or
that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know
enough to give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking,
and so I went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear
through to the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to
stone with horror. It was the sort of expression their faces would have
worn if I had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of
the Trinity; there is no milder way, in which to describe the petrified
condition and the ghastly expression of those people.
When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat. I
shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as miserable
again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what the
condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I shall
never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near me,
tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp. There
was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had good
intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It was an
atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's
salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put
into Cellini's autobiography. There was a frightful pause. There was an
awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had to
get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just burst
handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had
appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a place which would make any
novel respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel
itself was recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable.
Bishop was away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high
interest, consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air;
we may say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas
and from Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their

hands ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion,
and for the first time in his life speak in public. It was under these
damaging conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I
had spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able
to go on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but
Bishop had had no experience. He was up facing those awful
deities--facing those other people, those strangers--facing human
beings for the first time in his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it
was well packed away in his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable,
until I had been heard from. I suppose that after that, and under the
smothering pall of that dreary silence, it began to waste away and
disappear out of his head like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog,
and presently there wasn't any fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last
long. It was not many sentence's after his first before he began to
hesitate, and break, and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last
he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.
Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than one-
third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The