books have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support you again,” and that was a correct proposition.  He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin.  He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth for four years and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising that at the end of four years I would pay dollar for dollar.  That arrangement was made; otherwise I would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that.

You see his white mustache and his head trying to get white (he is always trying to look like me—­I don’t blame him for that).  These are only emblematic of his character, and that is all.  I say, without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever known.

THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER

          Addressat the typothetae dinner given at Delmonico’s,
          January 18, 1886, commemorating the birthday of
          Benjamin Franklin

          Mr. Clemens responded to the toast “The Compositor.”

The chairman’s historical reminiscences of Gutenberg have caused me to fall into reminiscences, for I myself am something of an antiquity.  All things change in the procession of years, and it may be that I am among strangers.  It may be that the printer of to-day is not the printer of thirty-five years ago.  I was no stranger to him.  I knew him well.  I built his fire for him in the winter mornings; I brought his water from the village pump; I swept out his office; I picked up his type from under his stand; and, if he were there to see, I put the good type in his case and the broken ones among the “hell matter”; and if he wasn’t there to see, I dumped it all with the “pi” on the imposing-stone—­for that was the furtive fashion of the cub, and I was a cub.  I wetted down the paper Saturdays, I turned it Sundays—­for this was a country weekly; I rolled, I washed the rollers, I washed the forms, I folded the papers, I carried them around at dawn Thursday mornings.  The carrier was then an object of interest to all the dogs in town.  If I had saved up all the bites I ever received, I could keep M. Pasteur busy for a year.  I enveloped the papers that were for the mail—­we had a hundred town subscribers and three hundred and fifty country ones; the town subscribers paid in groceries and the country ones in cabbages and cord-wood—­when they paid at all, which was merely sometimes, and then we always stated the fact in the paper, and gave them a puff; and if we forgot it they stopped the paper.  Every man on the town list helped edit the thing—­that is, he gave orders as to how it was to be edited; dictated its opinions, marked out its course for it, and every time the boss failed to connect he stopped his paper.  We were just infested with critics, and we tried to satisfy them