Then, after a long pause for dramatic silence, he uncorked his showstopper: “And if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”149 Grant fell apart with laughter. “I fetched him! I broke him up utterly!” Twain exulted to his wife. “The audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity.”150 To William Dean Howells, he added, “I shook him up like dynamite & he sat there fifteen minutes & laughed and cried like the mortalest of mortals.”
