As Mask Twain finished his Fourth of July speech at the Cecil and started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side said:
“Mr. Clemens, I have been wanting to know you a long time,” and he was looking down into the face of the hero of “Luck.”
“I was caught unprepared,” he said in his notes of it. “I didn't sit down—I fell down. I didn't have my tomahawk, and I didn't know what would happen. But he was composed, and pretty soon I got composed and we had a good, friendly time. If he had ever heard of that sketch of mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, I took my scalp home intact.”
CCXI. DOLLIS HILL AND HOME
It was early in July, 1900, that they removed to Dollis Hill House, a beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just outside of London. It was literally within a stone's-throw of the city limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then, and it retained all its pastoral features—a pond with lily-pads, the spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. Gladstone, an intimate friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. The old English diplomat used to drive out and sit in the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate Homer, and pace the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the English empire from that retired spot.
Clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if Gladstone was always at peace in his mind in this retirement.
“Was he always really tranquil within,” he says, “or was he only externally so—for effect? We cannot know; we only know that his rustic bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. Facts like this speak louder than words.”
The red-brick residential wave of London was still some distance away in 1900. Clemens says:
The rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand,
splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness
flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. Dreaming of what? That
they are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-office
District, N. W.? Indeed no. They are not aware of it. I am aware
of it, but that is all. It is not possible to realize it. For
there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple,
& as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea.