September 9 Wednesday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: “We met Santa today at the Cunard pier.

Paine came in pale, and I begged him not to quarrel there. He had no intention of that though. Santa came right up here to Redding and finds it very beautiful” [MTP: IVL TS 64].

Sam’s original guestbook contains the following guests: David L. Moore with Sept. 9; below Moore: Doris A.L. Fosdick, Stamford, Conn.; Beatrice Alice Beard, Flushing, L.I.; Bertha M. Jackson, Flushing, L.I.; Cornelia T. Talmage, Redding; Goyn Addison Talmage, Redding [Mac Donnell TS 2]. Note: guests assigned a single date usually came by for lunch or tea or dinner, and did not stay the night.

Clara Clemens returned to New York on the Caronia. The New York Daily Tribune, Sept. 10, p.7, covered her arrival:

MISS CLARA CLEMENS RETURNS HOME.

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Plans Concert Tour to Pacific Coast and Says Father Will Not Desert New York.

Miss Clara Clemens, the contralto, and daughter of Mark Twain, who had been abroad on a concert tour arrived here yesterday [Sept. 9] on the Cunard liner Caronia. She said her trip had been successful and that she would soon make a tour of the United States extending as far as the Pacific Coast.

      Mark Twain was not at the pier to meet his daughter, but as soon as the gangplank was made fast Miss Clemens received a letter from him, in which he explained that he was bilious, and, as his doctor had advised that he stay in Connecticut until the first frost, he thought it advisable not to go to the steamer to meet her. Miss Clemens said that, although her father may have known the meaning of what he wrote, she certainly did not know.

      Miss Clemens said the report circulated recently that her father would abandon New York City as his home was absurd. “Just wait until the first part of the real cold weather comes on,” she said, “and you will see father coming to New York on the fastest train.”

[Note: the article is instructive in that Clara, who decorated the 21 Fifth Ave. house, found it inconceivable that her father would choose to live permanently at the Redding house, which Isabel Lyon had planned and directed. It was possibly, as Hill points out (p.205), the beginning of the rupture between the two women.]

Josephine S. Hobby wrote to Lyon (though catalogued to Clemens) offering her services for copying [MTP].