Saratoga Evening Journal 2-21-1885 Twain and Cable. It would not be easy to find two more dissimilar gentlemen on the platform together than Mark Twain and George W. Cable. Their appearance in Saratoga last night was an event that will be long remembered by the large and delighted audience. Both possess a large parish of readers, and are among the most successful literary men of the day, Mr. Twain as a pure humorist, and Mr. Cable as a writer of fiction in a field almost entirely new. There is humor in Cable's writings, and the evident demand of his audiences for fun was indicated in his selection mostly of those passages which are characterized rather for humor than sentiment, although his last selection from “Dr. Sevier,” the ride of “Mary Richling,” was intensely dramatic and was given with intense dramatic power. Opinions will differ as to Cable's readings. His characters are not familiar, if we except the very pretty portraiture of “Kate Riley,” and Cable himself has a delicate tinge of provincialism about him, which would not please everybody. We like the man himself. He is tempered steel. He is both a genius and an artist. His pen has limned characters, unique in American literature, and as antique, clean cut and classic as a Florentine jewel or a portrait from a Venetian palace. And yet they are types of American life, that strange, quaint, passionate life that slumbered, flashed, glittered and burned, and has well nigh turned to ashes in the antique streets and quarters of a city almost as foreign and unknown to Americans as Madrid or Seville. In his brief selections last night Mr. Cable presented, so far as time allowed, his own conceptions of a few of the characters from his last story, “Dr. Sevier.” They are not, by any means, the best that he has created or depicted. But they were admirably personated. As to Mark Twain, it is needless to say that he carried the house by storm with his dry, infectious and irresistible humor. There is more in most of Twain's jests and humorous turns than in those of many humorists, in that they are almost all reinforced by auxilliary [sic] or sub-jokes, an annex, as it were to each joke, so that you hardly catch the report of one and begin to enjoy it when, like an echo, or a reverberation, or rather, like a repeating rifle, along come other jokes following close on the heels of their file leaders, (our metaphor is a little mixed) and each one apparently healthier and heartier than its predecessor. He will string more wit, and jokes, and humor, and fun on a single climacteric sentence than any one that we know of. And what a style the man has. It inspires confidence in the absolute unreliability of what he is going to say, the moment he appears on the platform and gravely takes you in with his severely sober but twinkling glance. He makes you the confidant of his villainies and his trials in a way that you cannot resist, and when the cold-blooded wretch has compromised you, he has you at his mercy and you can't get away, and he knows it. The first thing he did last night was to gain the sympathy of his dupes by reciting to them his struggles with German genders. Then he gave the details and disasters of a “little game” that he attempted to practice on an unprotected female in Switzerland; and then he recounted his experince in Nevada as a “fighting editor,” which must have made some of the Saratoga fighters burn with jealousy as he displayed the bloodthirsty traits in his editorial character. The entertainment was concluded with a blood-curdling ghost story which fairly startled his audience out of their seats. I got this courtesy: Teri Blasko Local History Librarian Saratoga Room Saratoga Springs Public Library