That the people of this city fully realize that this will be their last opportunity for hearing the most famous of all humorists, "Mark Twain," is evidenced by the already liberal demand for reserved seats. There is no doubt that the audience will be large and select and very few there are indeed who have enjoyed his "Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "The Gilded Age," or his "Tom Sawyer," but will be there to enjoy in person the readings and sayings of this most popular of writers. Unlike most authors, Mr. Twain has proved himself to be a capital entertainer. While his audience roars with laughter, he simply pulls his moustache and scowls. Sentences and phrases that, emanating from other lips, would seem dull and commonplace, provoke paroxysms of mirth when uttered by him. He reminds you of one you have seen before. You can't [illegible] be friends with him, for old acquaintance's sake, from the first. His manner and the humorous expression of his mouth, would create laughter if he should read an act of congress to the audience.

Mark Twain is today the most popular writer in the English language. Few men have ever written whose humor has so many sides -- such breadth of reach. Its passages provoke the joyous laughter of young and old, of learned or unlearned, and may be read or heard the hundredth time without losing, but rather multiplying in power. Sentences and phrases that seem at first only made for the heartiest laughter yield, at closer view, a sanity and wisdom that is good for the soul. He is, too, a wonderful story teller, and many will bear testimony that the very humor which has made him known around the world is sometimes swept along like the debris of a freshet by the current of his fascinating narrative. As a reader and speaker Mr. Clemens is outside and utterly beyond the reach of all conventional rule. But coming from his own lips his lines gather and convey innumerable charming significances. Laughter invariably greets his first period and attends him to the end and ceases with a sense in his hearers of having been captivated by no mere harlequinade of speech or manner, but by a genuine and healthful wit, as good to remember as it was to hear.

Mark Twain will deliver a lecture at the Tacoma theatre tonight.