November 20 Saturday — Sam met Albert Bigelow Paine at the train station in N.Y.C. to board the Bermudian for the voyage to Bermuda. In Robert Underwood Johnson’s Remembered Yesterdays, p.133, we find the following, which denotes that he had time to go to the funeral for Richard Watson Gilder: “As Mark Twain entered the Church of the Ascension at the funeral service, he said to a friend, ‘I wish that I were that man lying in there’.” Note: Paine in MTB does not mention Sam attending the funeral. He writes:
Next morning [Nov. 20] there was other news. Clemens’s old friend, William M. Laffan of the Sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. I met Clemens at the train. He had already heard about Gilder; but he had not yet learned of Laffan’s death. He said:
“That’s just it. Gilder and Laffan get all the good things that come along and I never get anything.”
Then, suddenly remembering, he added:
“How curious it is! I have been thinking of Laffan coming down on the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this Stetson-Eddy affair.”
I asked him when he had begun thinking of Laffan.
He said: “Within the hour.”
It was within the hour that I had received the news, and naturally in my mind had carried it instantly to him. Perhaps there was something telepathic in it [MTB 1541].