Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, there are many American writers today who in their way are great, and many, many more during this man''s life have come and gone—but Samuel L. Clemens, the delight of our fathers and our grandfathers, who, with his same brilliant wit and humor, was wilting of the Mississippi River and its first steamboat in the "Gilded Age" of the old South before the war, appears with us tonight as young in spirit, as humorous and as handsome as he ever was, and our only hope is that like Tennyson''s Brook and the application of steam to navigation by Robert Fulton he will "roll on and on forever."