University of Virginia Library

UNLETTERED AS THE BACKSIDE OF A TOMBSTONE

(Laughter.) If his stature were built according to the model of his conscience he would make a perfect gem for the microscope. And if his ideas were as large as his words it would take a man three months to walk around one of them. Talk? Why he would talk forever and ever. There is no such thing as stopping the man's tongue. If this audience should contract to sit and listen as long as he talked, they would die of old age, and if he should stand there and talk till he said something he would be chirruping away till the last trump sounded, and if he stopped there it would only be on account of the force of circumstance.

Mr. Clemens then reviewed at some length, practically and eloquently, the history of the late and present King of the Sandwich Islands; graphically described the great volcanic eruption of 1840; told several irresistibly funny stories, and closed his lecture as follows:

The land that I have tried to tell you about lies out there in the midst of the watery wilderness. In the very heart of the almost soilless solitudes of the Pacific. It is a dreamy, beautiful, charming land. I wish I could make you comprehend how beautiful it is. It is a land that seems ever so vague and fairy-like when one reads about it in books, peopled with a gentle, indolent, careless race.

It is Sunday land. The land of indolence and dreams, where the air is drowsy and things tend to repose and peace, and to emancipation from the labor, and turmoil, and weariness, and anxiety of life.

At the close of the lecture Mr. Clemens went off the stage as he came on, with well feigned awkwardness, and amid loud applause.