August 18 Monday – “Left London at 10.30 AM for Windermere—changed cars all day. Too much variety” [MTNJ 2: 339].
August 19 Tuesday – From Sam’s notebook:
Went up Windermere Lake in the steamer.—Talked with the great Darwin [MTNJ 2: 339]. Note: Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). Windermere is over 80 miles north of Liverpool; Condover some 70 miles south of Liverpool.
Sam wrote in the morning from Windermere, England to Andrew Chatto, asking a favor. He’d seen an etching, and possibly Clara Spaulding had admired it, in a picture-shop next to the Haymarket Theatre by James Abbot McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), of a view from his window on the Thames in Chelsea. Sam asked if Chatto would purchase it and send it to Clara at the Washington Hotel in Liverpool by the day after next. Sam added that their ship would sail Saturday morning [MTLE 4: 85].
"Some Anecdotes and Fair Words From an Old-time Well Wisher" By VINCENT STARRETT has provided some reviews that include “Some Piquant People,” by Lincoln Springfield, London, T. Fisher Unwin (1924). The Twainian Volume 4 no. 4 January 1945
“At another such evening (the author is speaking of Saturday night literary parties at a New York club visited by him) Mark Twain said the circumstance which gave him the greatest satisfaction in his life was the fact that Darwin, for a year before his death, read nothing but his works. Darwin’s doctors, he added, had warned him he would get softening of the brain if he read anything but absolute drivel.”