He liked coming to Boston, especially for those
luncheons and dinners in which the fertile hospitality
of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He dwelt equi-
distant from Boston and New York, and he had special
friends in New York, but he said he much preferred
coming to Boston; of late years he never went there,
and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
home from Europe to live in New York. At these
feasts, which were often of after-dinner-speaking
measure, he could always be trusted for something of
amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could
think of no other occasion for a dinner, he gave him-
self a birthday dinner, and asked his friends and au-
thors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like Waring
was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech
in which Clemens went round the table hitting every
head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks
for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he
congratulated Waring upon his engineering genius and
his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He
said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a
cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in
the down-hill course of the sewers, Waring would come
with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost
and carry it through the Common Council without op-
position. It is hard to say whether the time was gladder
at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Os-
good and Aldrich and I foregathered with him and
talked the afternoon away till well toward the winter
twilight.

He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at
one of the first of the now worn-out Authors' Readings,
which was held in the Boston Museum to aid a Long-
fellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons La-
throp (everybody seems to be late in these sad days)

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