October 14 Saturday – Twichell’s journal:

“Walked to Farmington and back with M.T. and C.D.W. [Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner] —a most delightful day. The delicious grapes at Mrs Whitmore’s, lunched at Mr. Gray’s and called on Miss Mary Perkins at Miss Porter’s school” [Yale, copy at MTP].

This entry of Twichell’s fits the day Sam went to hear Georgia Cayvan speak, though Twichell does not mention her. In his Nov. 20, 1906 A.D. Sam recalled Miss Cayvan after reading of her death:

I knew Georgia Cayvan thirty years ago. She was so young then, and so innocent and ignorant. that life was a joy to her. She did not need to say so in words; it beamed from her eyes and expressed itself—almost shouted itself—in her attitudes, her carriage, the tones of her voice, and in all her movements. It was a refreshment to a jaded spirit to look at her. She was a handsome creature….She was just starting in life; just making tentative beginnings toward earning her bread. She had taken lessons in the Delsarte elocution methods, and was seeking pupils, with the idea of teaching that art. She came to our house in Hartford every day, during a month or two, and her class came there to learn. Presently she tried her hand as a public reader. Once, when she was to read to the young ladies in Miss Porter’s celebrated school in Farmington, eight miles back in the country, I went out there and heard her. She was not yet familiar enough with the arbitrary Delsarte gestures to make them seem easy and natural, and so they were rather machine-like, and marred her performance; but her voice and her personality saved the day and won the praises of the house [AMT 2: 278, 581]. Note: Georgia Cayvan had a meteoric career on stage (1887-1894) and died of syphilis. Miss Sarah Porter’s boarding school for girls in Farmington, Conn., established in 1843. Sarah Porter (1813-1900); today the school has been called the top US boarding school for girls.