October 14 Sunday – Sam’s notebook: “Noon. About 500 miles to make. A spacious ship & most comfortable. Rides the seas level—hardly any motion. No sea-sickness on board. No table-racks” [NB 43 TS 27].

The New York World ran an article, “Mark Twain, the Greatest American Humorist, Returning Home, Talks at Length,” which included Twain’s ideas about autobiography given to reporters before sailing on Oct. 6 in London:

There has never been an autobiography or biography or diary or whatever you like to call it that has been written with quite the detachment from all anxiety about what the readers may think of it or its writer as this one of mine. Pepys, you might be disposed to think, was a miracle of candor even at his own expense, but even Pepys wrote with the consciousness that his contemporaries were looking over his shoulder, and despite all he could do he was fettered by a sense of restraint that consciousness produced. [Note: The Diary of Samuel Pepys had been a favorite of Twain’s since the early 1870s. MTCI 346-52; See also Gribben 539-40.]