August – From this month through October, Sam wrote “The Great Dark,” unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. It first ran in Letters from the Earth, 1962, Bernard DeVoto, ed. [Budd Collected 2: 1004].

Sam inscribed a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Lowden Sabbath Morn (1898) “To Livy / on her next birthday. / SL Clemens / Kaltenleutgeben, August, ‘98” [Gribben 663]. Note: Sam had requested the “new Stevenson book” from Chatto on July 26.

“At the Appetite-Cure” ran in the August issue of Cosmopolitan. It would be collected in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900) [MTB 1067; Camfield, Bibliog.].

Sometime during August Sam wrote to Mr. Miles. This letter is only referred to in the 19 Oct. 1889 issue of The Taranaki Herald, New Plymouth, NZ. The article:

It appears that a gentleman sent to Mark Twain (S.L. Clemens) a paper containing the observations made last session by Mr Kerr in connection with the chamois, in which Mark Twain was quoted as an authority. A reply has been received from Mr. Clemens, stating that the cutting has afforded him the heartiest laugh he has had this year. Incidentally, he says, it shows the danger of a man acting in a responsible public capacity being imperfectly up in the didactic literature of his times [MTP]. Note: see July 10, 1889 entry; Sam described the Chamois in ch. XXV of Tramps Abroad. His description had been read earlier that year in the Wellington Parliament in New Zealand.

Sam’s article about Jan Szczepanink, “The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again” ran in the August issue of the Century. It was later collected in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900).