May 20 Saturday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to daughter Clara, still in N.Y.C. recovering from an appendectomy.

dear, to get a letter from you was a happy surprise; I was not expecting so dear & rich a benefaction.

I recognize with the deepest satisfaction that you are safe in the spiritual shelter & refuge which all women & most men need, & I hope I shall be spared the crime of violating its sanctities & impairing its solaces & comforts as I did in your mother’s case—almost the only crime of my life which causes me bitterness now. (I must not dwell upon this subject.)

There is a letter from the lovely countess. There is only one. She opens the gates of her heart & lets her affection & her sympathies come flooding out in her same old quaint & charming & eloquent German English. I must not venture to quote the most moving things, but there are two or three messages that you are entitled to hear:

“Miss [Ethel] Newcomb told me that my sweet beloved Clara is ill & that she is not staying with you! It really is too dreadful! x x x Please, dear Mr. Clemens, be so very, very kind as to let me have soon some news about yourself & about your daughters, especially about my beloved Clara. I long with all my soul to have news from you. If it is possible, please tell Clara that I love her as I ever did before, & that mein ganzes, ganzes Herz voll Theilnahme bei ihr ist! x x x God bless you, dear, dear Mr. Clemens and believe me x x x

“Miss Wydenbruck.”

I shall write her to-day.

This house & this view—well, dear, I am as bewitched with them as Jean is. And Patrick! [McAleer] He is a vision out of a time when your mother was a girl & I a lad! And what a pleasure he is to my eye, & how the view of him fits in with the rest of the scenery! The same, same Patrick—trim, shapely, alert, competent for all things, taking two steps to any other man’s one, not a gray hair nor any other sign of age about him, & his voice that same old pleasant sound! He served us twenty-two years & is a youth yet.

D . Quintard’s idea is an excellent one, & we have discussed it pretty thoroughly & mapped out the scheme cleverly & intelligently. It is to be a club, & yet not a club. It will gather together at intervals, men of capacity, known or unknown, & of any trade—artist, doctor, blacksmith, author, scientist, merchant—& we shall feed economically & unostentatiously, & talk & smoke, & get acquainted & intimate. We shall carry out this scheme. It is better & more flexible & more catholic than the one I proposed to Howells before we left for Italy. For particulars see Quintard.

You are to sit up Saturday—that is, to-day. That is good news. Yes, you will miss Miss Gordon when you go away—I can understand that. She has ministered to your heart; it is not given to many to do that for us. To none, almost, beyond the frontiers of the family hearthstone. (And sometimes not even within those frontiers.) I wish she were going to Norfolk.

Jean will be very glad indeed to write you—she has been wanting to, these many ages.

Good-bye, dear, we are all loving you & thinking about you in this house—including him whom Jean calls “a contrary cuss & difficult to keep out of deadly indiscretions” [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the envelope: “This can be read first by your physician there being no secrets in it.” Miss Ethel Newcomb (1877-1959), pupil and and assistant (1904-1908) of Theordor Leschetizky. Patrick McAleer, the family’s coachman in Hartford for two decades, had been hired in March to be groom for Jean’s horses.

writes of McAleer:

Isabel Lyon’s journal:

A skilled rider and her [Jean’s] constant companion on horseback, Patrick had one drawback— he spit constantly. “It is too unpleasant to put up with,” Jean confessed to her diary, “& yet he is such a dear that I hate to say anything which could hurt his feelings.” Early that summer Patrick helped her buy a horse, a Kentucky bay she named Scott—“sweet and friendly in the stable, so obedient & willing on the road & such a beauty” [Lystra 47].

Yesterday when the sunset was glorious and my love of it made me say a word about its beauty, Mr. Clemens said “Yes that sore spot was fine” (pointing to an angry streak) “There was a lot of inflamation up there.” He watched Patrick (aged 60) stepping briskly toward the stable and said, “If Patrick were going to his own funeral, he’d step lively—” [MTP TS 59].

Isabel Lyon’s journal # 2: “An expert came up from Worcester to set up the orchestrelle”

Sam also wrote to Countess Misa Wydenbruck–Esterházy, letter not extant but referred to in the above to Clara. The Countess was the Clemens family’s cicerone in Viennese society and their closest friend outside musical and literary circles. See Nov. 29, 1897 entry.

Sam also wrote to Hamlin Garland.

“The book has come, & I thank you & am glad. For I can now start over again. I know the first chapters—by grace of the [‘]Weekly’—then the interruptions came, & broke up the march. I thank you again for remembering me” [MTP]. Note: See June 30 to Garland: The Tyranny of the Dark (1905) [Gribben 252].

gives this as the day Sam began “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” which would be 40,000 words and unpublished in his lifetime. It first appeared in Which Was the Dream, etc. Ed. Tuckey (1967). Starrett writes that Sam undertook the story “as a kind of therapeutic distraction from the sorrow and loneliness that followed the death of his wife in Florence, Italy, the previous spring. The long but unfinished fantasy, based on an idea for a satire Twain had been pondering for more than twenty years…. [was] admired by Paine as superb Swiftian satire” [MT Encyc. 735-6].