Now, in return for these concessions, I am willing to take anything in reason, and I think we may consider the business settled and the ausgleich ausgegloschen at last for ten solid years, and we will sign the papers in blank, and do it here and now.

Well, I am unspeakably glad to have that ausgleich off my hands.  It has kept me awake nights for anderthalbjahr.

But I never could settle it before, because always when I called at the Foreign Office in Vienna to talk about it, there wasn’t anybody at home, and that is not a place where you can go in and see for yourself whether it is a mistake or not, because the person who takes care of the front door there is of a size that discourages liberty of action and the free spirit of investigation.  To think the ausgleich is abgemacht at last!  It is a grand and beautiful consummation, and I am glad I came.

The way I feel now I do honestly believe I would rather be just my own humble self at this moment than paragraph 14.

A NEW GERMAN WORD

To aid a local charity Mr. Clemens appeared before a fashionable audience in Vienna, March 10, 1899, reading his sketch “The Lucerne Girl,” and describing how he had been interviewed and ridiculed.  He said in part: 

I have not sufficiently mastered German, to allow my using it with impunity.  My collection of fourteen-syllable German words is still incomplete.  But I have just added to that collection a jewel —­a veritable jewel.  I found it in a telegram from Linz, and it contains ninety-five letters: 

Personaleinkommensteuerschatzungskommissionsmitgliedsreis
ekostenrechnungs erganzungsrevisionsfund

If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep beneath it in peace.

UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

          Deliveredat the dinner given by the publishers of “The
          Atlantic monthly” To Oliver Wendell Holmes, in honor of his
          seventieth birthday, august 29, 1879

I would have travelled a much greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes; for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth.  When one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life, it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience.  You never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one, or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was, and the gratification it gave you.  Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap.