March 6 Thursday – Sam’s notebook: “10 a.m. Benjamin—I meet him at our station” [NB 45 TS 5]. Note: likely William Evarts Benjamin, H.H. Rogers’ son-in-law, taking the train from the city for a visit.

Albert E. Davis, President of the North Side Board of Trade, read a letter of regret from Mark Twain at their eighth annual dinner in the Metropolis Theatre Hall. The New York Times, Mar. 7, p.2, “North Side Board of Trade,” printed the letter and speeches:

I thank you very much for the invitation, but I am still booked for several dissipations this season and must not indulge myself with another.

I am trying to disqualify a remark made by one of those Emperors there in Europe who had fallen into a kind of habit of not being at home when I called, and who said—apropos of nothing, so far as I could see— “You have talent, Clemens, but what you lack is discretion.”