' Mark Twain '
Sir Ian MacAlister
To meet a man over your father's fireside when you are a boy, to visit his home, to meet him on and off over a period of twelve y.ears, is surely the way to know him, and that was how Sir Ian MacAlister , Secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, knew Mark Twain. His schoolboy experience of him was in the 'nineties, when Mark Twain , who was a great friend of Sir Ian's father, came to spend long evenings at their house in Hanover Square on one of his visits to England. In 1903, Sir Ian was in New York with his father and spent a day or two with Mark Twain. In 1907 the latter came over to England to take an honorary degree at Oxford and asked Sir Ian to put him wise about degree-giving and so forth. This was the last time they met, for Mark Twain died three years later.