Vol 3 Section 0212

Sam also put this date on an essay which Paine later titled, “A Viennese Procession.” AMT 1: 118 gives this description: “…highlights Clemens’s genuine delight in public ceremony and showy costume, describes a parade in honor of the fiftieth year of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830-1916), which was also celebrated with an extensive exhibition of” commerce and agriculture and science. The essay gives Sam’s movements and travel into Vienna on this Sunday morning. In part:

I went in the eight o’clock train to Vienna, to see the procession. It was a stroke of luck, for at the last moment I was feeling lazy and was minded not to go. But when I reached the station, five minutes late, the train was still there, a couple of friends were there also, and so I went. At Leising, half an hour out, we changed to a very long train, and left for Vienna with every seat occupied. …

I have seen no procession which evoked more enthusiasm than this one brought out. It would have made any country deliver its emotions, for it was a most stirring sight to see. At the end of the year I shall be sixty-three—if alive—and about the same if dead. I have been looking at processions for sixty years; and curiously enough, all my really wonderful ones have come in the last three years: one in India in ’96, the Queen’s Record procession in London last year, and now this one. As an appeal to the imagination—an object-lesson synopsizing the might and majesty and spread of the greatest empire the world has seen—the Queen’s procession stands first; as a picture for the eye, this one beats it; and in this regard it even falls no very great way short, perhaps, of that Jeypore pageant—and that was a dream of enchantment [AMT 1: 124-6]. Note: the religious procession in Jaipur, India in Mar. 1896 is described in FE, ch. 60. See source for full text.

Sam also wrote to an unidentified local woman:

“I thank you very much for the pleasant words you say in your note [not extant], & also for the copies of your books. I am almost always unoccupied at 11, mornings, & shall hope to see you next time. The afternoon is my working time—I was sorry, yesterday, that that was the case” [MTP].

June 27 Monday

June 28 Tuesday – In Kaltenleutgeben near Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Chatto & Windus, asking how many new books had been copyrighted in England for the past year. He needed it for an article [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Brainard Warner, Jr., United States Consul in Leipsic (Leipzig).

Dear Sir: I have waited to see if I could defeat my obstructions and come to Leipsic, but have failed. I cannot venture away from my desk lest I fail to finish work in hand and soon due. It costs me a pang to lose this Fourth in solitude when the fortunate may get on their feet and shout. Ordinarily I should not care, but I must care this time, for this is not an ordinary Fourth. On the contrary, it is a memorable one—the most memorable which the flag has known in thirty-three years—and there have been but two before it which may claim to rank with it as happy epoch posts in the history of the Republic—1865 and 1776. This one marks the burial of the estrangement which has existed so long and so perniciously between England and America, a welcome condition of things, which, if wisely nursed and made permanent, can be of inestimable value to both nations and incidentally to the world.

In reverence for liberty, in humanitarian and civilizing impulses, and in other great things of the heart and the spirit the two nations are kindred as well as in blood, and friendly relations between them mean the forward march of the human race. That old animosity is buried. Let us hope it will stay buried, and also hope that for centuries to come this august funeral will still continue to be celebrated at our Fourth, and that meantime any man who tries to dig up that corpse will promptly be put in condition to take its place. Truly yours. / Mark Twain [NY Times July 24, 1898, p.15, “Fourth of July in Berlin – Mark Twain Writes a Letter on Anglo-American Unity”].

Franklin G. Whitmore wrote to Sam, having rec’d Sam’s of May 5. The $1744.20 bill from Pratt &

Whitney was “indeed a very old matter. It was for making estimates and figures for the building of the plant for the Paige Machine; it took something like three months time with one or two expert men to compute the estimate. This

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