“From the bottom of our hearts we send our sympathy, dearest of friends.”

Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the Garden of Eden.

I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends, from the windows of the Krantz, Vienna’s sumptuous new hotel.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact.

“Appoint your court. I will bring a witness.”

I will go back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to examine this passage from it which I append.

The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time came.

The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire, and rapine spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress, horror, and woe rose in every quarter.

The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own. He hasn’t. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t.

A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty stings royalties only.

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures. You don’t really have to seek them—that is nothing but a phrase—they come to you.

My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old.