April 30 Tuesday – On the yacht Kanawha in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, Sam wrote to Frederick A. Duneka asking him to send a green cloth set of his books to H.H. Rogers to the yacht at the N.Y.C. pier, foot of E. 23 [MTP]. Note: the NY Times article of May 4, p.1, included a bit about this day:

For two or three days following the opening of the Jamestown Exposition, Mark Twain was marooned off Old Point. On Tuesday he was moving around the Hotel Chamberlain, complaining that his fellow-travelers had gone away and that the fog off the capes had delayed the departure of the Kanawha.

“Here I am, all, all alone on H. H. Rogers’s yacht anchored out there, and not a saint to look down in pity. Rogers has gone home, his son Harry has gone, and the only remaining guest that came down to this Exposition opening says he is going back to New York tonight, but I cannot go.

Mr. Clemens then explained that in the face of the fog that had enveloped the capes for at least two days the yacht’s navigator declined to risk the passage. The humorist himself then declared that the situation was rendered acute by his own peculiar brand of obstinacy. “I simply will not go back by train,” he remarked.

“I declare that I feel like the ‘Man Without a Country.’ I pine for Fifth Avenue and the dear old coaches, to say nothing of the arch in Washington Square.” [Note: see also the May 1, p. 7 article in the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch in Scharnhorst, p. 585].

Isabel Lyon’s journal: “Tonsilitis. Telegram from the King “Detained indefinitely by fog.”

And the papers tell of his loneliness with Mr. Broughton. All the other Rogerses came home by train” [MTP TS 55].

Julia Langdon Barber (Mrs. A.L. Barber) wrote a mourning border card to thank Sam for autographing her set of his books recently purchased from Harpers, “but my disappointment was of the keenest that you did not note in the Innocents Abroad, make mention of the fact that we were fellow voyagers in the old Quaker City” [MTP]. Note: on the Quaker City, she was Miss Julia L. Langdon, no relation to Charles, was among those who joined the QC at Gibraltar [MTL 2: 385].

Mary M. Keller wrote from Hartford, Conn. to ask Sam if he would meet her childhood friend while in Annapolis, “a charming Scotch woman named Worthington” [MTP].