Sam took a train from Buffalo at 12:30 A.M . and arrived at Ann Arbor, Mich. at 10 A.M. Sam wrote from Ann Arbor to Livy:

"...went straight to bed, declining President Angel’s [Buffalo University] invitation to dinner & meet ex-President Hayes’s wife & others at 6 this evening. It will be a long time before I sample anybody’s hospitality again. I have been asleep two hours, & shall resume it right off. I find no letters here—hope for some before we get away. I love you sweetheart "[MTP].

"The students generally, of whom the audience was largely composed, abandoned themselves to the most thunderous laughter every time Twain appeared on the stage; staid members of the University Faculty, who always maintained a twenty degrees below zero countenance in the classroom, laughed till they were out of breath; law professors, wrapped up in ponderous legal volumes, and who have not been known to smile in twenty-one years, fairly rolled off their seats from laughter at every point Twain made. Even a couple of Japanese students, who, although having a fair command of English, could not readily see the incongruities of Twain's remarks, felt in duty bound to join in the general feeling, and undoubtedly did their best, although several times they broke forth in the wrong place to the astonishment of those about them." The Northwestern 12-19-1884, Page 2; Evanston, Illinois

In a return engagement at University Hall in Ann Arbor the evening of December 12 the audience of three thousand was “phenomenal,” Sam wrote Livy. The odd couple recited without a hitch except for one small problem: Cable's half of the program, especially his rendition of “Mary's Night Ride,” had begun to consume increasing amounts of platform time, partly because he deliberately slowed the pace of his delivery and partly because he began to perform encores upon the slightest provocation. “How I do love to read the Night Ride,” he had written Louise from Washington in late November, “but it is a good half-day’s work crowded into seven minutes.” Within a month it had doubled in length, to Sam's disgust. He complained to James Pond that in New Haven “the ‘night ride’ was 7 minutes long—it is now 13.” In Ann Arbor that night, Cable raved to Louise, “ ‘Mary's Night Ride’ received a double encore” and as a result “we were [sic: Cable was] kept 30 minutes longer on the platform than we had expected to be.” Sam had been upstaged: Cable's name “draws a sixteenth part of the house, & he invariably does two-thirds of the reading,” he complained. More and more, rather than sharing the stage equally, Sam wanted Cable to be an opening act and to sing at intermission—to occupy the stage no more than one-third of the time. “He may have 35 or 38 minutes on the platform” during the two-hour show “& no more.” [From page 434 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]

There are two possible routes Sam and George may have taken to get from Buffalo to Ann Arbor.  The Canada Southern Railway ran from Fort Erie to Windsor, just east of Detroit on the Canadian side.  The southern route could have been the traditional line from Buffalo, through Cleveland and Toledo to Detroit.  From Detroit to Ann Arbor ran the Michigan Central, which was then controlled by the New York Central Railroad.