Submitted by scott on

From pages 151-54 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:

Sam Clemens and Joseph Twichell customarily hiked every Saturday from their Nook Farm homes to a lookout on Talcott Mountain, eight miles to the southwest, and back. They were sometimes joined by Charles Dudley Warner or students from the Chinese Educational Mission or the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. “Get him out on a walk into the country in pleasant weather, let the spirit of utterance be quickened in him,” Twichell observed about Sam, “and you have him at his best.” The “true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking,” Sam allowed in A Tramp Abroad (1880). “The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.” Twichell also cherished these opportunities to chat and to bathe their “souls and bodies in the delicious tinted light of the wood paths of Talcott Mountain.” Sam declared that Twichell “sometimes gains ideas” for his sermons from his companionship while he “obtains information from his pastor” that he worked “into comical and humorous stories.” They sometimes returned to Hartford “after one of these jaunts,” he recalled, “with the jaw ache, but never footsore.”

On one of these hikes, probably on November 7, 1874, Sam and Twichell struck on the notion of walking the next week from Hartford to Boston, a distance of about ninety-five miles, along the old stage turnpike “through a lot of quiet, pleasant villages, away from the railroads.” ...

and so, with little planning or foresight, they decided to leave from the East River Bridge in Hartford the following Thursday morning and “walk to Boston, just loafing along the road” merely “for the sake of talking and swapping experiences.” ...

The first day they trudged twenty-eight miles in ten hours through East Hartford and the “quiet, pleasant villages” of Buckland, Vernon, and Tolland. “The day is simply gorgeous—perfectly matchless,” he wrote his wife Olivia, “And the talk! Our jaws have wagged ceaselessly & every now & then our laughter does wake up the old woods—for there is nothing to restrain it, there being nobody to hear it.” They stopped at a roadhouse in Westford, Connecticut, about 7:00 p.m., about an hour before sunset, to spend the night. The route was so little traveled, Sam added, “that you don't have to be skipping out into the bushes every moment to let a wagon go by, because no wagon goes by.” In his journal Twichell referred to the inn as “a low tavern, but the best that was to be had.” More to the point, the innkeeper was so ‘sublimely profane” he responded to any sort of mild remark” with “a perfect avalanche of oaths,” much to Sam's amusement. ...

Before retiring on Thursday night, Sam and Twichell agreed that their walk “had developed into everything but a pleasure trip and was actually hard work.” They decided to abandon their pedestrian experiment, tramp no farther than the nearest train depot, and rail to Boston. Early on a bitterly cold Friday morning they plodded another seven miles to North Ashford, where they persuaded the proprietor of an inn, C. M. Brooks, a Yale University graduate and a former New York attorney, to carry them in his buggy to the Webster, Massachusetts, rail station. ...

Around noon they left for Webster in “a narrow seated buggy behind the slowest horse I ever saw,” Twichell noted. “It was a very cold tedious ride of 10 m[iles] and we suffered the acutest hardship of the whole trip in taking it. Mr. Brooks wouldn't accept a cent of pay” for the service but charged three dollars “for the man who owned the horse.” ...

Upon reaching the city, they registered at Young’s Hotel. There they found a note from Howells urging them to hurry to his home on Concord Avenue in Cambridge. When they arrived around 9:00 p.m. they found a dinner party in progress ...

[November 15th, Sam and Twichell] left on the 9:00 p.m. train to return to Hartford.


 

Start Date
1874-11-12
End Date
1874-11-16

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