November 22 Monday — The Bermudian arrived in the islands on a rainy day. They took rooms at the Hamilton Hotel. D. Hoffman writes:
Confined by the rainy day, Clemens discussed the possibility of a new planet. To his mind, even if life was governed by the same great laws of nature that so perfectly regulated celestial movement, the vast dimensions of outer space signified the miniscule importance of the human race. More than thirty years earlier, he had written of Tom Sawyer being as thrilled “as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet.” Mathematical studies of perturbations in the orbit of Uranus now led Sir Percival Lowell to postulate an unseen planet beyond Neptune. “I believe in the new planet,” Mark Twain impishly wrote earlier in 1909, “I am so sensitively constructed that I perturbate when any other planet is disturbed. This has been going on all my life. It only happens in the watermelon season... I know there is a a new planet. I know it because I don’t perturbate for nothing” [135]. Note: See n9, p. 175 in source. See also MTB 1541-2, which notes that Clemens brought along a book, The Pith of Astronomy (Without Mathematics): The Latest Facts and Figures as Developed by the Giant Telescopes, by Samuel Gamble Bayne (1844- 1924) [Gribben 53].