June 1 Saturday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: Will came out today and there was very great music in the afternoon. The piano is down in hall and from my 3rd story I slipped down a flight, I had on a long thin black silk gown that made a little swish, just enough for the King who stood in his underdrawers in the 2nd hall, to hear and make him look up at me with his eyes shining with delight. He had come home from Mary Rogers’s and had gone to bed tired. I was picking wild azalea up on the bank (for the great mass of dogwood on the table the night before had cut off his view of every face, and he wanted to pick it up and throw it out the window), when he came slowly up the hill, and went right to bed, so there he stood in the hall listening to Santa. He had slipped off his trousers and stockings and he had his yellow calabash pipe in his hand. It is so true, that the ruts people complain that I am in because I don’t holiday more, are far higher than their greatest heights [MTP TS 62-63]. Note: Charles E. Wark, “Will” was Clara’s touring pianist.

Athenaeum ran an anonymous review of King Leopold’s Soliloquy, p. 664. Tenney: “Very brief review. Declares that ‘Mark Twain is a serious writer of considerable courage as well as a humorist,’ and his pamphlet is ‘a trenchant satire’” [43].

Isabel Lyon gave Sam a copy of Puck of Pook’s Hill¸ by Rudyard Kipling (1906), and he thought he saw resemblances in it to parts of his “Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts [Gribben 381: Lyon’s journal].

Howells & Stokes wrote to Sam about problems with the excavation of the Redding house [MTP].