February 14 Thursday – At 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Sam wrote to daughter Jean in Katonah, N.Y.

I am very very glad, Jean dear, that you are having such wholesome & healthful good times & are so contented & happy. Poor little Clara isn’t so fortunate; she has been laid up with a bad throat & hoarseness, but she went to Atlantic City yesterday & will soon be in shape again she thinks.

To-day I am to appear in public again, to my discomfort. I am weary of public appearances. But Mrs. Gilder asked me, & I wouldn’t refuse Dorothea’s mother any reasonable thing; I couldn’t. I am to read Shelley’s Skylark. I have never done anything of quite so serious a nature before, & would rather not be so serious this time—but I must obey orders.

My Autobiography has reached 400,000 words at last, & now I have no more solicitudes about it & can go slow & easy & take my time henceforth if I choose.

I knew the elder Park Benjamin quite well. This Mrs. B. is the wife of a son of his, I suppose.

Good-bye—with worlds of love— [MTP]. Note: Jeans’ incoming is not extant.

The New York Sun, Feb. 15, p. 6 reported on a reading Mark Twain gave at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for the Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome, Italy:  

Mark Twain read Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” and Browning’s “Memorabilia”—a word, he said, that he never could pronounce. Before “To a Skylark,” Mr. Clemens said, “In that long ago time, the happiest of my life, I read that poem more than any other to my wife. Hers was a beautiful nature. Her heart touched this poem and it is sacred to me. I think it is not only the most famous lyric in the English language, but the most beautiful in any language.” [Note: Fatout (p.676) lists this as a reading for Mrs. Gilder, but she isn’t mentioned in either this article nor the NY Times for Feb. 15, p.11, “Keats-Shelley Meeting Pleases”; however, in his letter to daughter Jean,   Sam revealed Mrs. Gilder asked him to speak at the event; Isabel Lyon recorded the two readings in her journal: Gribben, p.94].

Isabel Lyon’s journal: The King dined with Miss Herring at the Arts Club. Spencer Trask was there & he & the King compared Secretaries.

But first the King read Shelley’s “Skylark” at the Shelley-Keats Memorial at the Waldorf. He was bored to extinction & hated it all. I sat away back in the hall,— with Ashcroft sitting bedside me—& after the King’s reading, which came 3 rd—we all slipped away. These days I cannot stand a crowd of people. I must have solitude & a remoteness from herds, if I cannot have my own—my own?

The King said that he suffered trying to get those people onto the platform. He worked with Stedman,  the chairman, & agonized over it—& finally said that if they wouldn’t go on, he’d “be damned if he didn’t go on alone!” & he’d have done it too. Before he started he was chilly, so he took some whiskey & just enough to bring cobwebs to make him forget the things he planned to say, but he made a beautiful little speech mentioning Mrs. Clemens in it, before he read “The Skylark” & Browning’s “Memorabilia”. After the readings, Hopkinson Smith who was on the platform kept on talking while Mr. Stedman was addressing the audience, & the King said to him—“Will you shut up?” Smith looked at him saying with the look—“Do you mean that as an insult?” & the King’s look fired back, “Yes, that’s just what I do mean.” All this he told me as we rolled down Fifth Avenue in the cab. He was cross & irritated & hated it, & was glad to be through. He came in & called for Paine & billiards—but Paine was out, so the King went to bed until dressing for dinner-time came.  

After a cosy dinner a deux, AB & I came up to my study where we went through a lot of negatives & had an illuminating talk. He is going to California & out to see old companions of the King-Joe Goodman & Horace Bixby & Cal Higbie & Tabitha Greening & Laura Dake & others too, if he can find them, to glean from them memories of the King’s early life [MTP TS 27-29; Shelly mentioned in Gribben 640].

Gertrude Natkin sent Sam a valentine [MTP; not in MTAq].