August – In the Galaxy for this month—MARK TWAIN’S MEMORANDA – Included “Personal Explanation,” “Portrait,” and:

A MEMORY

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering. As a general thing I was a backward, cautious, unadventurous boy; but once I jumped off a two-story stable; another time I gave an elephant a “plug” of tobacco and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep, and got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in hearing of my father. Let us not pry into the result; it was of no consequence to any one but me [Schmidt]. Note: referred to in the 1840s entry.

Joe Goodman, in a Mar. 13, 1908 letter to Paine, recalled visiting Sam in Buffalo, probably in August:

I was abroad in the Spring of 1870 when Mark was married, and didn’t see him and his wife till I returned in July and went up to Buffalo to visit them [The Clemenses were in Elmira most of July, so it is assumed Joe visited sometime in August]. I arrived just before dinner time, and Mark took me up to my room and showed me a bottle of whiskey on the table, which he had persuaded Livy to place there by telling her it was awful sinful, of course, but that I had lived in sin all my life and she couldn’t expect to reform me except by gradations. We took a pull at the bottle and went down to dinner. I was talking and laughing and running on at about forty knots, when I suddenly observed that there was nothing doing—that everybody seemed to be waiting for me to finish; so I shut up at once. Then Mark bowed his head and began in a sepulchral voice: “O Lord, for that we are about to receive”—I couldn’t restrain myself, it was so absurd; I just snorted, and Mark finished amid my uncontrollable laughter. Afterwards, by ourselves, I asked him when the change of heart had occurred. “Oh, Hell! There isn’t any change,” he said. “Of course, I don’t believe in it, but Livy does, and I want to do everything I can to please her; so I try to go through with it solemnly and reverently [The Twainian, Jan-Feb 1956 p1].