Sam and Cable left Washington for Philadelphia, where they gave a reading in Association Hall.

“...this same performance in Philadelphia could have been the one that was followed, as Cable remembered it, by Twain's rueful groaning, 'Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any longer.' That night and the next day, according to Cable, Twain devoted himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which he deemed justified both as humor and as 'literature and art'”. (pg25 Cardwell)

"One of his yarns contemplated the reform of the human race by preventing the habit of profanity among men. The reform was to be accomplished by substituting mechanical swearing through the means of the phonograph. The effect of this contrivance on shipboard, colored by all the possibilities of swearing in foreign languages, and swearing backwards and multiplying the force of it by placing as many as one hundred and fifty phonographs in different parts of the ship was too much for the most serious audience in the world, and there was a continuous burst of laughter." The Philadelphia Inquirer 1884: November 27 Touring with Cable and Huck