To the donors of the gift Clemens wrote:
The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its friendly "Aloha" was the first uttered greeting received on my 73d birthday. It is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such things which was born in me & which I have seldom been able to indulge to my content. It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & I beg to thank the committee for providing me that pleasure.
To F. N. Otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word:
I am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. It is worthy of the choicest place in the house and it has it.
It was the second beautiful mantel in Stormfield—the Hartford library mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the Stormfield living-room.
Altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. Clemens, in the morning, drove down to see the library lot which Mr. Theodore Adams had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. He recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing I said:
"I hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game."
And he answered, as then:
"Yes, it is a great game—the best game on earth." And he held out his hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted, though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine.
Mark Twain's second present came at Christmas-time. About ten days earlier, a letter came from Robert J. Collier, saying that he had bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to Mark Twain as a Christmas gift. He added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for it, and the loan of a keeper from Barnum & Bailey's headquarters at Bridgeport.