July 1 Wednesday – Sam and Albert B. Paine were still in Boston at the Hotel Touraine, staying the third night there [July 5 to Sturgis]. According to Paine:

Clemens did not wish to hurry in the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight- seeing, and driving around and around Commonwealth Avenue in a victoria in the cool of the evening. Once, remembering Aldrich, he said:

“I was just planning Tom Sawyer when he was beginning the ‘Story of a Bad Boy’. When I heard that he was writing that I thought of giving up mine, but Aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. He thought my Missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of New England, and of course he was right.”

He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. He said:

“Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual island — a towhead, as they say on the river — such an accumulation of intellect we call a group, or school, and name it.

“Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group. Now there’s been still another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable. It will soon be gone. I suppose they will have to name it by and by.”

He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited in other days. The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and more distinguished sights. Clemens mildly but firmly refused any variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to twinkle among the trees [MTB 1456-7].