Gilder at Mark Twain’s 70th Birthday Celebration
►I found . . . that to do full justice to Mark Twain as a human being would require a thesis so detailed, learned and spacious that there is no time for it to-night.
He and you will rejoice
in this, I am sure, for thus is,
at least temporarily, averted that fatal result which was intimated in a recent English school examination where it was distinctly stated by one of the contestants that "in the United States
people are put to death by
elocution.“