Mark Twain's Speeches

COLLEGE GIRLS

          Five hundred undergraduates, under the auspices of the Woman’s
          University Club, New York, welcomed Mr. Clemens as their guest,
          April 3, 1906, and gave him the freedom of the club, which the
          chairman explained was freedom to talk individually to any girl
          present.

I’ve worked for the public good thirty years, so for the rest of my life I shall work for my personal contentment. I am glad Miss Neron has fed me, for there is no telling what iniquity I might wander into on an empty stomach—I mean, an empty mind.

I am going to tell you a practical story about how once upon a time I was blind—a story I should have been using all these months, but I never thought about telling it until the other night, and now it is too late, for on the nineteenth of this month I hope to take formal leave of the platform forever at Carnegie Hall—that is, take leave so far as talking for money and for people who have paid money to hear me talk. I shall continue to infest the platform on these conditions—that there is nobody in the house who has paid to hear me, that I am not paid to be heard, and that there will be none but young women students in the audience. [Here Mr. Clemens told the story of how he took a girl to the theatre while he was wearing tight boots, which appears elsewhere in this volume, and ended by saying: “And now let this be a lesson to you—I don’t know what kind of a lesson; I’ll let you think it out.”]