What should he cable in reply?
I said-- "Say the report is greatly exaggerated." He never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those words.

The remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this day it keeps turning up, now and then, in the newspapers when people have occasion to discount exaggerations.
The next man was also an Irishman.

He had his New York cablegram in his hand--from the New York _World_--and he was so evidently trying to get around that cable with invented softnesses and palliations that my curiosity was aroused and I wanted to see what it did really say.

So when occasion offered I slipped it out of his hand.

It said, "If Mark Twain dying send five hundred words.