If Tom Sawyer had owned the magic wand, he
hardly could have produced anything as startling as that.
He sailed on the 8th of June, 1907, exactly forty years from the day he
had sailed on the "Quaker City" to win his greater fame. I did not
accompany him. He took with him a secretary to make notes, and my
affairs held me in America. He was absent six weeks, and no attentions
that England had ever paid him before could compare with her lavish
welcome during this visit. His reception was really national. He was
banqueted by the greatest clubs of London, he was received with special
favor at the King's garden party, he traveled by a royal train, crowds
gathering everywhere to see him pass. At Oxford when he appeared on the
street the name Mark Twain ran up and down like a cry of fire, and the
people came running. When he appeared on the stage at the Sheldonian
Theater to receive his degree, clad in his doctor's robe of scarlet and
gray, there arose a great tumult--the shouting of the undergraduates for
the boy who had been Tom Sawyer and had played with Huckleberry Finn.
The papers next day spoke of his reception as a "cyclone," surpassing any
other welcome, though Rudyard Kipling was one of those who received
degrees on that occasion, and General Booth and Whitelaw Reid, and other
famous men.
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