When Mark
Twain received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young
daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be
anybody left for him to become acquainted with but God! Mark said that
it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter;
but of course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to
conclusions without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on
'Life on the Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a
similar tribute, the same evening, from the portier of his
lodging-house. He loved to dwell upon this, in later years--declaring it
the most extraordinary coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a
portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should have
expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the very same verdict,
upon one of his books, almost in the same hour and the same breath.
The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of
Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was
hailed as the greatest humorist in the world.
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