much there was to pay.  They replied that they did not charge the clergy anything.  I have cherished the delight of that moment from that day to this.  It was the first thing I did the other day to go and hunt up that shop and hand in my hat to have it ironed.  I said when it came back, “How much to pay?” They said, “Ninepence.”  In seven years I have acquired all that worldliness, and I am sorry to be back where I was seven years ago.

But now I am chaffing and chaffing and chaffing here, and I hope you will forgive me for that; but when a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is heart-breaking bereavement.  And so our reverence is for our dead.  We do not forget them; but our duty is toward the living; and if we can be cheerful, cheerful in spirit, cheerful in speech and in hope, that is a benefit to those who are around us.

My own history includes an incident which will always connect me with England in a pathetic way, for when I arrived here seven years ago with my wife and my daughter—­we had gone around the globe lecturing to raise money to clear off a debt—­my wife and one of my daughters started across the ocean to bring to England our eldest daughter.  She was twenty four years of age and in the bloom of young womanhood, and we were unsuspecting.  When my wife and daughter—­and my wife has passed from this life since—­when they had reached mid Atlantic, a cablegram—­one of those heartbreaking cablegrams which we all in our days have to experience—­was put into my hand.  It stated that that daughter of ours had gone to her long sleep.  And so, as I say, I cannot always be cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing; I must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside, and recognize that I am of the human race like the rest, and must have my cares and griefs.  And therefore I noticed what Mr. Birrell said—­I was so glad to hear him say it—­something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top of this: 

              “He lit our life with shafts of sun
               And vanquished pain. 
               Thus two great nations stand as one
               In honoring Twain.”

I am very glad to have those verses.  I am very glad and very grateful for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection.  I have received since I have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions of people in England—­men, women, and children—­and there is in them compliment, praise, and, above all and better than all, there is in them a note of affection.  Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection —­that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have that reward.  All these letters make me feel that here in England—­as in America—­when I stand under the English flag, I am not a stranger.  I am not an alien, but at home.