The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain [good summer reads .TXT] 📗

days more⁠—still I was not able to get down underneath, where it was working, and so I was filled with doubt and distress. I went to Fuller and said he must advertise more energetically.

He said he would. So he got a barrel of little things printed that you hang on a string⁠—fifty in a bunch. They were for the omnibuses. You could see them swinging and dangling around in every omnibus. My anxiety forced me to haunt those omnibuses. I did nothing for one or two days but sit in buses and travel from one end of New York to the other and watch those things dangle, and wait to catch somebody pulling one loose to read it. It never happened⁠—at least it happened only once. A man reached up and pulled one of those things loose, said to his friend, “Lecture on the Sandwich Islands by Mark Twain. Who can that be, I wonder”⁠—and he threw it away and changed the subject.

I couldn’t travel in the omnibuses any more. I was sick. I went to Fuller and said: “Fuller, there is not going to be anybody in Cooper Institute that night, but you and me. It will be a dead loss, for we shall both have free tickets. Something must be done. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I had the pluck and the outfit.” I said, “You must paper the house, Fuller. You must issue thousands of complimentary tickets. You must do this. I shall die if I have to go before an empty house that is not acquainted with me and that has never heard of me, and that has never traveled in the bus and seen those things dangle.”

“Well,” he said, with his customary enthusiasm, “I’ll attend to it. It shall be done. I will paper that house, and when you step on the platform you shall find yourself in the presence of the choicest audience, the most intelligent audience, that ever a man stood before in this world.”

And he was as good as his word. He sent whole basketsful of complimentary tickets to every public-school teacher within a radius of thirty miles of New York⁠—he deluged those people with complimentary tickets⁠—and on the appointed night they all came. There wasn’t room in Cooper Institute for a third of them. The lecture was to begin at half past seven. I was so anxious that I had to go to that place at seven. I couldn’t keep away.

I wanted to see that vast vacant Mammoth Cave and die. But when I got near the building I found that all the streets for a quarter of a mile around were blocked with people, and traffic was stopped. I couldn’t believe that those people were trying to get into Cooper Institute, and yet that was just what was happening. I found my way around to the back of the building and got in there by the stage door. And sure enough, the seats, the aisles, the great stage itself, was packed with bright-looking human beings raked in from the centers of intelligence⁠—the schools. I had a deal of difficulty to shoulder my way through the mass of people on the stage, and when I had managed it and stood before the audience, that stage was full. There wasn’t room enough left for a child.

I was happy, and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich Islands out on to those people with a free hand, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in Paradise. From every pore I exuded a divine delight⁠—and when we came to count up we had thirty-five dollars in the house.

Fuller was just as jubilant over it as if it had furnished the fame and the fortune of his prophecy. He was perfectly delighted, perfectly enchanted. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut for several days. “Oh,” he said, “the fortune didn’t come in⁠—that didn’t come in⁠—that’s all right. That’s coming in later. The fame is already here, Mark. Why, in a week you’ll be the best-known man in the United States. This is no failure. This is a prodigious success.”

That episode must have cost him four or five hundred dollars, but he never said a word about that. He was as happy, as satisfied, as proud, as delighted, as if he had laid the fabled golden egg and hatched it.

He was right about the fame. I certainly did get a working quantity of fame out of that lecture. The New York newspapers praised it. The country newspapers copied those praises. The lyceums of the country⁠—it was right in the heyday of the old lyceum lecture system⁠—began to call for me. I put myself in Redpath’s hands, and I caught the tail end of the lecture season. I went West and lectured every night, for six or eight weeks, at a hundred dollars a night⁠—and I now considered that the whole of the prophecy was fulfilled. I had acquired fame, and also fortune. I don’t believe these details are right, but I don’t care a rap. They will do just as well as the facts. What I mean to say is, that I don’t know whether I made that lecturing excursion in that year or whether it was the following year. But the main thing is that I made it, and that the opportunity to make it was created by that wild Frank Fuller and his insane and immortal project.

All this was thirty-eight or thirty-nine years ago. Two or three times since then, at intervals of years, I have run across Frank Fuller for a moment⁠—only a moment, and no more. But he was always young. Never a gray hair; never a suggestion of age about him; always enthusiastic; always happy and glad to be alive. Last fall his wife’s brother was murdered in a horrible way. Apparently a robber had concealed himself in Mr. Thompson’s room, and in the