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withered and bald; she blooming with wholesome old age. He peered
through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice: "Come
to my arms! Away with titles--I'll know ye by no names but Twain and
Twichell! Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear,
the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: God bless you, old
Howells what is left of you!"
We talked late that night--none of your silent idiot "communings" for
us--of the olden time. We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our
tongues and drank till the lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow
past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him and resumed its sweeter
forgotten name of New York. In truth he almost got back into his ancient
religion, too, good Jesuit, as he has always been since O'Mulligan the
First established that faith in the Empire.
And we canvassed everybody. Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came
in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his
earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor--but
he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for
engaging in the same enterprise. He was as chaffy as he was sixty years
ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston--but
there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace
of God he got the opportunity.
The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy
and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred with the
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