As usual, the family vacationed in the summer of 1887 at Quarry Farm, leaving Hartford on June 21, spending a week in New York, and arriving in Elmira on June 29, Sam devoted his working months at the farm to reading and writing, indulging in particular his taste for history and biography with Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England from the Accession of James II (1849), The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the Reign of Louis XIV and the Regency (1857), Prince Metternich’s Memoirs (1880), George Standring’s The People’s History of the English Aristocracy (1887), and rereading for the umpteenth time Thomas Carlyle'’s History of the French Revolution (1837). This time, however, the History was not the same book. “When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was. a Girondin,” he wrote Howells, the champion of the Haymarket anarchists. “Every time I have read it since, I have read it differently—being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment (& Taine & St. Simon): & now I lay the book down once more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!—And not a pale & characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat,” a radical revolutionary. “Carlyle teaches no such gospel: so the change is in me—in my vision of the evidences.”
[From page 526 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]
July 11 Monday – Sam took the ten-hour trip to New York City
July 25 Monday , NYC He stayed at the St. James Hotel .
September 5 Monday – Sam may have gone to Hartford for a few days
September 13 Tuesday – In the morning the Clemens family left Elmira for New York City, where they stayed at the Murray Hill Hotel