January 26 to February 2 –– Sometime during the short stay in Bermuda, Sam traveled to Somerset to see 29-year-old Upton Sinclair, who had arrived on the island on Dec. 20, 1907 for a six-month stay. In 1906 Sinclair sent a copy of his best-known book, The Jungle, to Clemens (see Gribben 644). At this time Sinclair was collaborating with fellow socialist Michael Williams on a book about health. The Royal Gazette of Feb. 8 reported on Sam’s trip to Somerset. D. Hoffman writes, quoting the Gazette:

      …the carriage ride to Somerset took so long they had no time for a vegetarian dinner. Although he did “not go to the length of declaring himself a vegetarian,” the paper said, Clemens was “in the habit of curing occasional ailments by total abstinence from meat during periods of a week or more at a time”  [98-9].

Also during the trip, day undetermined:

His A.D. for Feb. 14 concerned his discovery of a new photographic process called Lumiere, and of a photograph he had taken with Margaret Blackmer. This may have taken place any time during the stay.

One’s first contact with a fresh, new, thrilling novelty is for him a memorable event. I still remember quite clearly the wonder and delight that, swept through me the first time I ever saw a daguerreotype; and alone with it was the sense that there wasn’t any reality about this miracle; that it was a dream, a product of enchantment—beautiful, astonishing, but impermanent. I still remember my first contact with the electric telegraph, and with the phonograph, and with the wireless, and with the telephone, and with the Hoe press—which with my own eyes I saw print twenty thousand newspapers on one side in an hour, and cauldn’t quite believe it although I was actually seeing it. Oh, compare that wee marvel with to-day’s press! In Bermuda an addition was made to the list of these great first contacts, these splendid impossibles: it was the autochrome. I had never seen a sample of that lovely miracle before. A gentleman amateur there had half-a-dozen pictures, made by himself by the Lumiere process, of Bermudian scenery, and a picture of his little girl reposing in the midst of tapestries and vases and rugs, and flowers, and other things distinguished for variety and beauty of coloring, and I was carried away with them. I was glad to have lived to see at last that old, old dream of the photographer come true—, the colored photograph painted by the master, the sun.

How many wonderful inventions have had their birth since I was born. Broadly speaking, it is an interminable list. I was born in the same year that the lucifer-match was born, and the latest link in this great chain is the dainty and bewitching Lumiere.

The amateur whom I have spoken of was preparing an article about the lumiere process for one of the great magazines, and he wanted a picture of me for use as one of the illustrations. I was quite willing to sit, but said Margaret must be put into the picture with me. The picture was notably successful. I was in white, and so was Margaret. Her frock was a very white white, and her white jacket had broad lapels of an intense red; also she wore a red leather belt. My white clothes were of three slightly differing shades of white, and in the picture those shades were exactly reproduced— the coat one shade of white, the shirt-front a slightly whiter white, the necktie a slightly whiter white than the shirt-front. The Lumiere had a sharper eye than myself; I had not detected those differences until it revealed them to me . . . . .

One day Miss W. [Wallace] betrayed to me one of Margaret’s sweet little confidences. Margaret said to her,

“No.”

“Is Mr. Clemens married?”

Margaret after a little pause said, with a dear and darling earnestness, and much as if she were soliloquizing aloud,

“If I were his wife I would never leave his side for a moment; I would stay by him and watch him, and take care of him all the time.”

It was the mother instinct speaking from the child of twelve; it took no note of the disparity of age; it took no note of my seventy-two years; it noticed only that I was careless, and it was affetionately prepared to protect me from my defect [MTP].