July 4 Tuesday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: “Painted Shadows”, I’m reading. Mr. Binner [sic Bynner] sat in front of me on the porch this afternoon. Mr. Binner— ……..and………. He came with Mr. Faulkner. The same lovely eyes that I had been remembering. His talk is very, very good, and he called me “The Lion of St. Mark”. I told Mr. Clemens of it when he came in from a Fourth of July punch with Mr. Pearmain, down the trail, and he laughed with a beautiful joy. You remember that singing laugh for days. Mr. Clemens had a pleasant time, and found Col. Higginson’s daughter beautiful. He chatted during dinner and then afterward read more of that lovely story. The fading away of the Duplicate is beautiful. He walked the room, smoking his pipe and remembering back to his early literary days. It was brought up by his saying that Mr. Binner is living in such a good time, for the world is full now of young writers who admire each other just as the young writers admired each other in those early days, when they used to meet in Pfaff’s cellar and have such good fun. Dr. Holmes and Emerson and those fine Boston men were a generation ahead of Mr. Clemens and he didn’t see more of them than just to go up to Boston for their “seventy” birthdays. For himself there are only Mr. Howells and Mr. Aldrich, and he surprised me into recognizing the truth by telling me that he hasn’t had much of a literary friendship with men, and he hasn’t. Hartford is presumably between New York and Boston, but it isn’t. After dinner we stood on the porch and looked off at the glowing west with such a slender girlish slip of a moon hung in it, and suddenly you remembered it was the Fourth of July, for a beautiful, graceful rocket soared with Monadnock for a background toward a heaven it couldn’t reach—and burst in piteous despair to fall to earth again.

Today down at Mr. Pearmain’s Mr. Clemens was talking with a Harvard Professor who said that not long since a Yale graduate asked him what a “fortnight” was—and he knew of another graduate who didn’t know who Jehovah was—knew he was mentioned in the Bible but didn’t know what prophet he was. [MTP TS 73-74]. Note: Sumner Bass Pearmain (1859-1946), stock broker.

Chatto & Windus wrote to Sam and enclosed a July 1 statement of sales, together with their check for £106.18.4 [MTP].

Joe Twichell wrote to Sam, that in writing his letter of July 3 he’d forgotten to tell about his visit to Pittsburg, where he lunched at the Dusquene Club with a “party of gentlemen,” one of whom was the Hon. Judge Shiras of the US Supreme Court. The judge swore Joe had a striking resemblance to Twain, especially his profile. “Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.” Joe thought that “blackwashing” should be a word, and the opposite of whitewashing, and that it could be applied to Twain’s “discourse on Theodore” Roosevelt. He closed with the news he’d been trying a bit of Plasmon lately—“Is that a fact of any interest to you now?” [MTP]. Note: Judge George Shiras, Jr. (1832-1924); at press time for this volume, Shiras is the only Supreme Ct. Justice (1892-1903) to have no record of public service.