When one of its members dies, Congress adjourns in respect to his memory. Now that Mark Twain has passed away, the world will pause, if but for a moment, in its work and its play, its planning, and money-getting, to honor him. For thousands that never saw him felt that they knew him, and knew that they loved him.

It has been said of Emerson that he lifted the idols of men from their pedestals and placed them reverently on the ground. Mark simply poked the false gods in the ribs, and they came down of their own accord. Herein lay his great work, that he mercifully emancipated human beings from their foolish prejudices and their foolish selves. His was not the cynicism of the world weary, but the sturdy irreverence of eternal boyhood, and his never failed to embody something of his nature in his works, or to impart it to his readers.

We have wept with him at the grave of Adam, gathered "dornics" with him in the Holy Land; we have stayed behind and counted the silver spoons with the czar after this irrepressible had passed, and then hastened on to join him again. We have traveled up and down the Mississippi with him and Huck Finn and the Dolphin, and together have hobnobbed with real royalty. We have studied art with him, to much profit, and have come to know, under his guidance, that a good way to tell a St. Sebastian was by the arrows, and that it was a man's inalienable right to say that Turner's pirate ship looked like a "yellow tomcat expiring in a platter of stewed tomatoes," if we thought that way.

Now that he has gone, the world will seemingly go on as before. None knew this better than he. And yet there is a conviction that the scheme of life has altered for his having lived here; that sham and pretense can never rule as fully again as before he came laughing along.

And how sympathetic he was! How quickly responsive to the true nobility in man, wherever found, in high or low! He never ridiculed the right.

Tears and smiles for loved Mark Twain! Tears for the passing of such a soul from earth, and smiles in memory of his work and in the assurance of his happiness beyond.

Old Innocence has gone abroad, and

the sea is wide between.

I saw his hand on the misty wheel as

he steered for the darkened main

He took his laugh and he took his pipe

and the place where his heart had been,

And he crossed the bar where the

waters gulped the plumb-line below mark twain.

He has steered from the flats and the

yellow flood that he knows from bed to brim

To the greenish gush of a stranger

wave that bathes every western star;

And "Give me my glasses," I heard him

say--for the night of the Lord is dim,

And the salt spray blinds and the

wind cuts cold as the ship sails out by the bar.

'Twould be time to weep for the good

gray head that is lost in the driving spray

Were there not in my study window

here a boy with a puckered lip,

And he whistles shrill, "Oh, Buff'lo

gals, ain't you coming out today?"

So I know tonight that he'll join

Huck Finn and go for a pirate trip.

'Twould be time to weep for the one

that's gone did the boys he loved go, too,

But Tom and Joe and Sid and Huck

on my study shelves I spy.

So good-by, Mark Twain, may you steer

far out; may the wheel at your helm turn true;

And I'll keep Tom straight while

you're off to sea, and for Huck--well, Mark, I'll try.