Some weeks later, at a dinner which Sir Sidney Lee gave in our honor in London, we heard an echo of this incident. Sir Sidney included the story of Mark Twain’s speech on that occasion, which had been omitted in the earlier narrative. When called upon, Mr. Clemens had said,
“I’m not going to make a speech,—I’m just going to reminisce. I’m going to tell you something about our host here when he didn’t have as much money as he has now. At that time I was the editor of a paper in a small town in Connecticut, and one day, when I was sitting in the editorial sanctum, the door opened and who should come in but Andrew Carnegie. Do you remember that day, Andy?” he inquired, turning to his host; “wasn’t it a scorcher?”
Carnegie nodded, and said he remembered it perfectly.
“Well,” Mark Twain continued, “Andrew took off his hat, mopped his brow, and sat down in a chair, looking most disconsolate.
“‘What’s the matter?’ I inquired. ‘What makes you so melancholy?’—Do you remember that, Andy?” he again appealed to his host.
“Oh, yes,” Carnegie replied, smiling broadly; “I remember it as if it were yesterday.”
“‘I am so sad,’ Andy answered, ‘because I want to found some libraries, and I haven’t any money. I came in to see if you could lend me a million or two.’ I looked in the drawer and found that I could let him have the cash just as well as not, so I gave him a couple of million.—Do you remember that, Andy?”
“No!” Carnegie answered vehemently; “I don’t remember that at all!”
“That’s just the point,” Mark Twain continued, shaking his finger emphatically. “I have never received one cent on that loan, interest or principal!”
I wonder if so extraordinary an assemblage of literary personages was ever before gathered together as at the seventieth anniversary birthday dinner given to Mark Twain by Colonel George Harvey at Delmonico’s in New York! Seated at the various tables were such celebrities as William Dean Howells, George W. Cable, Brander Matthews, Richard Watson Gilder, Kate Douglas Wiggin, F. Hopkinson Smith, Agnes Repplier, Andrew Carnegie, and Hamilton W. Mabie.