Vol 3 Section 0161

the false rumor of your violent expulsion from the parliament e.g.—what harm in letting Charley Clark print

that? By the way, in yours of the 10th inst. you spoke of some other people’s letters you were going to send me

with it, but you forgot them finally.

…

So your brother Orion has ended his pilgrimage. Our memory of him is of a gentle and amiable spirit— remarkably disposed to the things of good will. May he rest in peace [MTP].

December 28 Tuesday

December 29 Wednesday – In Vienna, Austria Sam replied to H.H. Rogers’ Dec. 17 (not extant).

“Yours of the 17th arrived this morning & is immensely gratifying in various ways. Lord, we are glad to see those debts diminishing! For the first time in my life I am getting more pleasure out of paying money out than pulling it in.”

Sam suggested that the Mt. Morris Bank should be paid a thousand or two a year until ten thousand was paid and then no more. He would then demand to know “what went with the false notes of $9,000.” He would like to see Harpers do better with his old books and advertise them more, but supposed they knew their “own business pretty well.”

I am very very glad that you like the book, & that others do. The notice in the Sun delighted me all over. I think John Wagner must have written it.

I guess the World article will help Bliss, rather than hurt the business. I was getting a little tired of being traded on as the only real living, unrivaled, genuwyne marketable pauper.

We seem to have a lot of money in your hands. Very glad of it, too. Pay it to our creditors. But save the gas stock.

This is a most cussed expensive town. When I get out of debt I will burn it & build a cheaper one.

Sam then claimed to have written some 30,000 words on a new book, not specified. Here pages are lost

[MTHHR 310-11].

Henry C. Robinson wrote to Sam, filling him in on all the “boys” of the now “gray- haired, limping crowd the Monday Night Club is!” They had met twice recently, with Charley Clark “as funny as a frog about Mexico” and General William B. Franklin (1823-1903) offering “some Ante-Bellum-Mexicanum reminiscences.” They played billiards with the Republican Club . Twichell had grown “a little deaf”; “Parker preaches better than ever”; “Brer Whitmore is as a busy as a pop corn in a corn popper”; Ned Bunce “had kind of a bad attack, but has got about well again” [MTP]. Note: editorial emphasis.

December 30 Thursday – On this day or Dec. 31 Sam’s notebook reveals a performance by Leschtizky:

At Madame von Dutschka’s. Choice people there. Leschetizky played. A marvelous performance. He never plays except in that house (she says). He sacrificed himself for his first wife—believed she wd be the greatest pianist of all time—& now they have been many years separated. If he developed himself instead of her, he would have been the world’s wonder himself.

Baron von Berger lectured upon me yesterday [NB 42 TS 51-2].

Life magazine included an anonymous review of FE, p. 578:

“Mark Twain has been so much exploited as a ‘humorist’ that people are apt not to realize that he is remarkable as a writer of great acuteness in observation and felicity of phrase in description. There is real poetry feeling in many of his pictures of landscape.” FE “is a strange conglomerate of philosophical

SLC used mourning border for most letters from Susy’s death on, then from Livy’s death on.