February 15 Friday – Sam’s notebook: “Doubleday, 7 pm 111 E. 16th” [NB 44 TS 6].

Sam was unable to attend the Feb. 14 annual Sheriff’s Jury dinner at the Hotel Savoy, and so wrote a letter declining shortly before. The New York Tribune ran Twain’s letter on p.6:

SHERIFF’S JURORS DINE.

————

MARK TWAIN’S LETTER OF DECLINATION

AROUSES LAUGHTER.

Mark Twain declined to attend the annual dinner of the third panel  of the Sheriff’s Jury at the Hotel Savoy, but his letter giving his reasons for not attending was read to the diners, and caused much laughter. The humorist said, among other things:

I will not go where any Sheriff’s Jury is ambushed. I would rather flee to Porto Rico, where alone a suspected person is safe. For there he is a citizen or a foreigner, or both, or neither, in the eye of the law, and can shift around under those various disguises faster than any Sheriff can follow him.

The New York Tribune published Mark Twain’s piece, “Mark Twain Says Not I. / The Humorist Insists that the Rev. Dr. Ament Arraigned Himself.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote to Sam, advising he’d sent a telegram “to brace you up.” Aldrich had written “six beautiful paragraphs” but found no market for them in the Boston papers except the Evening Herald, which took one. “Howells’s obituary paper on you is one of the finest and most delightful essays I ever read. He gets better and better. What a writer he will be at 100!” His wife was laid up with the grippe [MTP].

Annie A. Fields (widow of James T. Fields) wrote to Livy that they owed Sam “ a large debt…for his paper in the North American” [MTP].