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He Can Keep an Audience in an Uproar Without an Effort. Butte, Aug. 1. -- It is doubtful if Maguire's opera house ever contained a more delighted audience than the one that filled it to-night to listen to Mark Twain. From his first story of the night he spent with a coroner's subject until he startled the audience out of their seats by the sudden ending of his ghost story, the people laughed until laughing became painful. He spoke for an hour and a half and told the ludicrous story of the jumping frog, the story about Huckleberry Finn when his feeling got the best of his "consciences" while aiding "Jim," the slave, to escape. Greater was the man who started to tell about an experience his grandfather had with a ram, but just before reaching the thrilling part of his narrative wandered from his subject and never got back to it. The story reminded many people in the audience of a well-known citizen of Butte. Then came the story about Mr. Twain's first theft, when he stole a watermelon from a peddler's wagon, and finding that it was green, how his conscience troubled him, until he returned it to the peddler and made him give him a ripe one in exchange for it. The next narrative was about Tom Sawyer's crusade, and that was followed with the final number of the programme, the ghost story about the golden arm. After the lecture many were honored with an introduction to the noted humorist and called on him at the Butte where Mr. Clemens, wife and daughter and Major J. B. Pond and wife are stopping. |