Mark Twain at Barnard College

LEWIS LEAR^'

Edi ior's Note: The following account is expanded from some of
the background material prepared by Professor Leary for his
recent edition of Mark Twain's Letters to Maty {Columbia
University Press), which includes correspondence from i^oo to
1^10 between the humorist and young Mary Benjamin Rogers,
the wife of Henry Huddleston Rogers, Jr. Mrs. Rogers presented
these letters to the Cohmibia Libraries in i ^$^ so that others might
remember also "how aimising and stimulating and inspiring" Mark
Twain had been in "that far flown day." The volume now con¬
taining this collection of letters written to a friend of the Columbia
Libraries is dedicated to the Friends of the Cohnnbia Libraries.
 

DURING the spiing (
I have newspapers rel
He was incessantly
 

vURlNG the spiing of 1906, Mark Twain was pleased to
; refer to him as "the Belle of New York."
y bus\- replying to honors showered on
him and attending fetes arranged in his honor. In the pieceding
November, Harpers had given him a tremendous seventieth birth¬
day dinner, a "sk\-scraping banquet," his friend William Dean
Howells called it, at which "172 immortals sat down to the best
Delnionico's could do, and remained glutting and guzzling food
for reflection for five hours after the dinner was ended." Mark
Twain's speech on that occasion, thought Howells, "was divinely
dioll, sweet, touching and wise."

In spite of his activit\- and the adulation showered on him, the
humorist was a lonely man. His w'iit had died not two \ears
before. His youngest daughter was dead and his next daughter an
invalid, and Clara, his oldest daughter, was busily occupied in her
musical career. Mark Twain spent what time be could with old