January 28 Monday – In his A.D. Sam referred to songs: “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” as he had in Ch. 11 of PW back in 1894 [Gribben 236]. He also referred to the Jan. 26 dinner, when Senator Clark of Montana “rose to the tune of … ‘God Save the King,’ frantically sawed and thumped by the fiddlers and the piano” during Union League Club speeches [263]. “The Star Spangled Banner” [370]. Note: Devoto selected this day’s dictation for inclusion in Mark Twain in Eruption (1940) p.70-77.  

Isabel Lyon’s journal: “They” poem.   Englishman

The King played billiards all the afternoon & all the evening. At luncheon when we were talking about Kipling again & the obscurity of “They” I told the King how the story is now in book form & prefaced by a beautiful explanatory poem & ran upstairs to get it for him. He read it aloud as we sat at the table & he was deeply moved by its beauty & by the last part of it especially.

[written diagonally and in red pencil:]

The poem in my Kipling—“Traffics & Discoveries” [TS 24].

In Sam’s A.D. he mentioned Finley Peter Dunne (pseud. Mr. Dooley); he “is brilliant; he is an expert with his pen, and he easily stands at the head of all the satirists of this generation” [Gribben 209].  

Davis Johnson, attorney in Van Wert, Ohio wrote a Mark Twain fan letter to Sam, confessing that reading TS and HF now to his own children gave him the same pleasure it did when he was six [MTP].