We never saw an audience so determined to laugh “out loud,” in all our experience, and we confess to having laughed ourselves until our sides fairly ached, and we could see several speakers swimming in the tears in our eyes. Mr. Twain’s dry humor and inimitable drollery we never saw equalled, and he conducted his hearers from one laugh into another with such rapidity that scarce a breathing spell was afforded between the outbursts which, as a friend remarked after the lecture, followed each other like the reverberations of thunder. Mr. T. also gave his audience several specimens of his descriptive ability. His account of the Sphynx, being our ideal of poetic thought embodied in the choicest language. It was certainly one of the finest bits of description that we have met with in many a day.

We congratulate those who were present, and we feel deep sympathy for those who remained away and missed a grand opportunity of hearing a speaker who, as a humorist and wit, stands unrivaled on the American stage. (“Mark Twain Is Coming,” Galena [Ill.] Gazette, 26 Jan 69, 3, reprinting the Rockford [Ill.] Register, 9 Jan 69)

“Christmas is here—eighteen hundred and sixty-nine years ago the stars were shedding a purer lustre above the barren hills of Bethleham, and possibly flowers were being charmed to life in the dismal plains where the shepherds watched their flocks, and the hovering angels were singing, peace on earth, good will to men—for the Savior was come. Don’t you naturally turn in fancy now to that crumbling wall and its venerable olives, and to the mouldy domes and turrets of Bethleham? And don’t you picture it all out in your mind as we saw it many months ago? And don’t the picture mellow in the distance and take to itself again the soft, unreal resemblance that poetry and tradition give to the things they hallow?

And now that the greasy monks and the noisy mob, and the leprous beggars are gone, and all the harsh cold hardness of real stone and unsentimental glare of sunlight are banished from the vision, don’t you realize as in other years, that Jesus was born there, and that the angels did sing in the still air above, and that the wondering shepherds did hold their breath and listen as the mysterious music floated by? I do. It is more real than ever, and I am glad, a hundred times glad, that I saw Bethlehem, though at the time it seemed that that sight had swept away forever every pleasant fancy and every cherished memory that ever the City of the Nativity had ever stored away in my mind and heart.” (“Mark Twain,” Cleveland Herald, 16 Jan 69, 4)