February 16 Friday – Sam gave a speech as the honorary head of The Ends of the Earth Club at the Savoy Hotel. The New York Times reported on p.9:
ENDS OF EARTHERS FOREGATHER HERE AGAIN
And Astonish Mark Twain with Some Very Brief Reports.
——— ——— ———
HE AND OTHERS REMINISCE
The Author Tells How He Filled Cooper Union 39 Years Ago—150 Globe Trotters at Dinner.
Once every year a body of men of prime fellowship, hailing from the four corners of the earth, but speaking the Anglo-Saxon tongue, gather in New York to see each other, shake hands, and say “How d’ye do.” They call their organization The Ends of the Earth Club. The name typifies their clan, for it is to the very jumping-off places of the earth that its membership of men in every known profession reaches, and if the fun they had at their third annual dinner at the Savoy Hotel last night didn’t penetrate to the ends of the glove, it was the sole fault of modern methods of communication.
The Ends of the Earth Club, of which Mark Twain is the honorary head, with Rudyard Kipling and Admiral George Dewey as members of the Honorary Council, was formed three years ago by globe trotters of New York and elsewhere in the world, whose idea was to dine together once every twelve months and exchange felicitations. Here are its principles:
Members: Good fellows with no axes to grind who speak our language.
Lodge: Wherever the four ways meet—the North and South and East and West trails.
Greeting: “Where do you come from?” “I come from the ends of the earth.”
What for?”
“To speak the language.”
Mark Twain was the honorable guest and made the main speech at the dinner last night and sat next to Gen. James H. Wilson, who, although the speeches were all informal, acted as toastmaster. Mr. Clemens did not arrive at the dinner until 10 o’clock. When he did appear the Ends of the Earthers rose and sang, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Now, the Ends of the Earth Club has no regular quarters and has no business to transact, but at each dinner it goes through the mock form of receiving reports from its Secretary and “The report of the Secretary,” responded Secretary C. Bowyer Vaux, indicating the menu card, “is already in cold type before you.” Treasurer. ….
Mark Twain, in beginning his talk, said he never intended delivering another speech or another lecture, but that when it came to reminiscences he would take care of his share.
“I don’t quite get the hang of this club,” he said. “You don’t know what the Treasurer’s report furnishes except that it doesn’t furnish anything. I might just as well be in the S.P.C.A. I don’t know whether you adopted that method or whether the Society for the Propagation of Cruelty to Animals adopted it. [Laughter.] Only you do come out better than they do.”
Mr. Clemens then went on to tell about Mulberry Sellers, to whom Gen. Wilson had alluded in his introduction.
“When I was writing the book,” he said. I had great trouble with Mulberry Sellers. I had the man’s name written originally as Mulberry Sellers. A friend told me I ought to change it.
“ ‘Make it Escol Sellers,’ he advised.
“ ‘But I’m afraid,’ I replied. ‘An Escol Sellers may be living and we may get into trouble.’
However, I made it Escol Sellers and one day a man from Philadelphia, a stately and cultivated gentleman, approached me.
“ ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘my name is Escol Sellers. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to take my name out of that book.’
“We did it, but that didn’t end the trouble, for a Mulberry Sellers turned up in Wisconsin, one on the Wabash, and others from various parts of the country.”
Mr. Clemens then told of his first lecture delivered at the Cooper Institute thirty-nine years ago.
“I met a man on the streets of New York a few weeks ago,” said he. “He was my old friend Fuller, ninety years gone and gray-headed. I was glad to see him, and the moment I laid eyes upon him I was brought back to my first lecture in New York, at Cooper Institute. Fuller was the man who proposed it. I demurred.
“ ‘Nobody knows me here, Fuller,’ I said, ‘and the thing will be a failure.”
“ ‘No such thing,’ he argued. ‘We will fill the house at $1 a head.’
“I was young enough to be deceived by his flamboyant talk and immediately had dreams of filling the house at $1 a head. He suggested Cooper Institute. I’ve been there once, and don’t want to go again.
“They advertised me as the “Eloquent and Celebrated Mark Twain.” They hung up in the city buses great bunches of flimsy cards advertising my coming lecture. The cards were to be pulled down and read by anybody interested. I saw them and got to haunting those buses. I rode up and down, up and down through this town of New York watching with beating heart and hoping that someone would pull one of those sheets.
“I never saw anybody do it. I finally advised Fuller to flood the city with paper, and we did so. We sent out barrels of complimentary tickets. When the eventful night came, the streets were blocked with struggling men and women. The house was jammed with people. I felt flattered, for it was my first lecture in the East. It was a magnificent triumph. We had a superb time, and we took in $35. I remarked about this to Fuller the other day.
“ ‘No,’ he said, “it was $350.’
“I didn’t hold that against him and ask him for the money, because it happened too long ago.”
Clemens’ A.D. for this day: Susy’s Biography mentions little Langdon—The change of residence from Buffalo to Hartford—Clemens tells of the sale of his Buffalo paper to Mr. Kinney—speaks of Jay Gould, John A. McCall and John D. Rockefeller [AMT 1: 363-366].
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “Every day except Sat. & Sun. Mr. Paine & Miss Hobby come & every day is a delight & an inspiration to those two—and to Mr. Clemens as well. He does enjoy it so.
Lu B. Cake wrote to Sam that “some time ago” she’d sent her book Who Killed Him? Gentiles, not the Jews, and had “begged a line to help bring the case before the public more fully, not that you endorse the contents…” She was preparing a circular and had obtained responses from “eminent ones,” such as ex-President Grover Cleveland. On or after this date Sam replied that he had “very little time to read therefore economized by reading subjects which interested him “& this one does not” [MTP].
Mary E. Joyce wrote from NYC to thank Sam for his response to her search for badges or buttons for her club of fifteen crippled boys. “I had no idea of anything so perfectly beautiful coming in answer to my letter, and the boys will be as delighted as I am….The club is the ‘Little Men’s Club,’ and the idea of having the initials on the button with the picture is a fine one” [MTP].
The Monmouth (N.J.) Daily Review sent Sam a telegram asking “In what work will we find ‘Definition of a gentleman’” [MTP].
William H. Rideing for Boston Youth’s Companion wrote to Sam. “I enclose 2 copies of the photograph I spoke of at the Players the other night and I shall be very much obliged if you will write you’re your autograph in pencil on one and your autograph and a line or two besides on the other, which I mean to keep for myself” [MTP].
W.W. Sturges wrote from Meadville, Mo. to Sam.
I notice the remarks in the papers about the piece of poetry sent you concerning the lightning bug & like yourself I don’t think it applies to you; but here is one I think does:
De Lady bug hab de golden wing:—
De firefly hab de flame;
De bed bug don’t hav no wing at all;
But he gits dare all de same.
Sturges, who signed himself “scientist” added a PS: “Please hand my best regards to our mutual friend ‘Eli Perkins.’”[MTP].
Of the selections from Twain’s A.D.’s, DeVoto selected about half of the materials not chosen before by Paine to be included in Mark Twain in Eruption (1940); among DeVoto’s choices, was “The Teaching of Jay Gould,” dictated this day, in which Twain decried Jay Gould’s greed; he made fun of a “seemingly pious article” about John McCall, and excoriated Americans who held the unprincipled rich in high esteem [77-81].
February 16 ca. – Robert Fraser Standen wrote to Sam. “I should be much obliged if you will inform me when this book of yours, substantiating the accusations made against Mrs Eddy in the postscript above quoted, may be expected to be placed before the public” [MTP]. Note: Sam replied on Feb. 24. Standen had quoted a PS of Sam’s in his letter to Harpers on Dec. 2, 1905.