May 25 Saturday – In Tuxedo Park, N.Y. Sam drafted a telegram to George Thomson Wilson, Secretary of the Pilgrim Club, N.Y. branch: “Please cable Secretary Brittain for me 25 suits me exactly” [MTP].

Isabel Lyon’s journal: Every morning the King tells me his adventures, or lack of them, of the night before. It’s a dear trait and he takes you so into his confidence when he explains that 3 times his logs broke into a gaudy fire and 3 times he drenched them so with water that he feared the blue ceiling down stairs would be ruined. At first he used his full vocabulary of swear words, oh there never was such a profane pressure—it lessened and finally he hadn’t a word to say. He is lovely in his white clothes these days. We are making plans for his sailing on the 8th. I’ve been ordering his clothes and attending to so many precious duties for him. He is the world wonder [MTP TS 60].

Ralph W. Ashcroft wrote to Sam advising that he’d rec’d a letter from “one of Liverpool’s leading men,” a friend of Ashcroft’s, asking if Sam would “accept the freedom of the city, and a Lord Mayor’s banquet, and all sorts of frills.” [MTP]. Note: Lyon wrote on the letter: “Have already declined by cable”

Spectator ran an anonymous article, “Mark Twain” p. 825-6. Tenney: “An enthusiastic but rather superficial survey of MT’s life and works for English readers when MT came to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford” [43].

Andrew Lang’s article, “At the Sign of St. Paul’s,” ran in Illustrated London News, p. 798. Tenney gives us the brief note, in full: “The great American humorist, who has just passed his seventieth birthday, comes to Oxford this summer to receive the degree of D.C.L.” [44].