  Mark Twain was the life of every company and all occasions. I remember a practical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party of us were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card was brought to me from a reporter of the World. I was about to deny myself, when Mark Twain said: "Give it to me, I'll fix it," and left the table. Presently he came to the door and beckoned me out. "I represented myself as your secretary and told this man," said he, "that you were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as well I would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn't know either of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we'll have some fun." No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little bald-headed cherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined out to him a column or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in every opinion. I declared him in favor of paying the national debt in greenbacks. Touching the sectional question, which was then the burning issue of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: "The 'bloody shirt' is only a kind of Pickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during political campaigns and on election day. Perhaps you do not know that I am myself of dyed-in-the-wool Southern and secession stock. My father and grandfather came to Ohio from South Carolina just before I was born. Naturally I have no sectional prejudices, but I live in Cincinnati and I am a Republican." There was not a little more of the same sort. Just how it passed through the World office I know not; but it actually appeared. On returning to the table I told the company what Mark Twain and I had done. They thought I was joking. Without a word to any of us, next day Halstead wrote a note to the World repudiating the interview, and the World printed his disclaimer with a line which said: "When Mr. Halstead conversed with our reporter he had dined." It was too good to keep. A day or two later, John Hay wrote an amusing story for the Tribune, which set Halstead right. Mark Twain's place in literature is not for me to fix. Some one has called him "The Lincoln of letters." That is striking, suggestive and apposite. The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a kinship outside the circumstances of their early lives; the common lack of tools to work with; the privations and hardships to be endured and to overcome; the way ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest; every footstep over a stumbling block and each effort saddled with a handicap. But they got there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the stars the light of their eyes is shining down upon us even as, amid the thunders of a world tempest, we are not wholly forgetful of them.
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