Sam and Cable arrived in Toronto, Canada at 4:30 P.M . on the Great Western train from Niagara Falls [Roberts 19]. In Toronto, Rose Publishing Co. applied to Sam to buy the Canadian rights to publish Huck Finn [Dec. 10 to Webster, MTP]. Ozias Pond was not the tour’s manager until after New Year’s day, but came with the pair. They all stated at the Rossin House, Toronto’s first luxury hotel. In the evening Sam and Cable gave a reading in Horticulture Gardens Pavilion, a 2,500 seat hall only six years old. The next day the Toronto papers, The Telegram, The Globe, The World, and The Mail were unanimous in pronouncing the reading a success. Tickets were 50 cents, reserved seats 25 cents extra. [Roberts 21].
As he sometimes did, George W. Cable wrote his wife Lucy while waiting for his turn on stage:
"Such a time as we are having! Such roars of British applause. I never heard anything like it out of N. Orleans. .. . We are in a big glass Horticultural Hall with people so far away at the bottom of the audience that their features can hardly be discerned. . . . When I go back upon the platform again (in a moment) I have to sing my 2 or 3 Creole songs. I always shrink from this, the only thing I do shrink from; though it’s always encored" [Turner, MT & GWC 67].
Sam wrote at midnight from Toronto to Livy, listing the items he ate for his “hearty breakfast at 9 this morning.” He also ate a large lunch at 1 PM on the “hotel car.” He’d also just finished a late “supper of beefsteak &c.” Sam told of the night’s performance: “To-night a noble hall to talk in, & an audience befitting it. Both of us had a gorgeously good time. I saw ladies swabbing their eyes freely & undisguisedly after Cable’s ‘Night Ride.’ He did it well” [MTP].
Sam and Cable were driven around Toronto to see the sights, which included the University of Toronto. They visited the studio of painter Andrew Dickson Patterson (1854-1930) famous a year later for his portrait of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald (1815-1891).
Sam wrote from Toronto, Canada to Livy:
"Livy darling, guess who I stumbled on in the hotel car yesterday, with cheery countenance & healthy appetite? Frank Hall the exile. He said he was going to Chicago. We have been all over town, to-day, in the crisp cold air, but I read too long, after going to bed,—read past the sleepy point—& so I have lost my afternoon nap. However, I’m getting a bath ready, & shall go from that to the platform & be all right, no doubt "[MTP].Sam enclosed a short article about the power of a half dozen schoolgirls to brighten up Sphinx-like people on a railroad car. “These be the heavenly bodies in the firmament of our home & life,” Sam wrote across the article.
In the evening, Sam and Cable gave a second Toronto performance in Horticulture Gardens Pavilion. Both Toronto events were sold out [Roberts 22]. The Toronto Globe ran a 2,000-word article on the Dec. 8 performance, including a near verbatim record of Sam’s conversations between Huck and Jim [Cardwell 27-8].
"The readings by Mark Twain and George W. Cable, the novelist, which had been looked forward to with such pleasure by Toronto people, were given in the Horticultural Gardens Pavilion last evening. Hardly a seat was left vacant. All the reserved seats were taken before the evening, and people were at the doors soon after seven anxious to be in time to get the best seats that were left. The entertainment was given under the auspices of the Ladies' Aid Society of the Metropolitan Church, which fact must have had something to do with making the audience so large. As might have been expected at such an entertainment, the people there were of the very highest class." Toronto Globe 1884: December 9 Touring with Cable and Huck
After their normal Sunday off in Rochester on December 7, Sam and Cable traveled via Niagara Falls to Toronto the next day, arriving at 4:30 p.m. and registering at the plush Rossin House before two nights of readings at the packed twenty-five-hundred-seat, glass-enclosed Horticultural Pavilion. Though Cable insisted to Louise that they had received “roars of British applause” such as he had “never heard” outside of New Orleans, and though Sam claimed to Livy that both of them “had a gorgeously good time” and he had seen “ladies swabbing their eyes freely & undisguisedly” after Cable declaimed “Mary’s Night Ride,” in fact Cable flopped north of the border if one judges from the unanimous opinion of reviewers for the five daily Toronto papers. [From page 432 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]
Railroads: Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Lewiston and Great Western