December 3 Wednesday – In Boston Sam spoke at the Atlantic Monthly Breakfast for Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 70th birthday [Fatout, MT Speaking 134]. This time there was no embarrassment, as Sam delivered a Howells-approved speech. Sam met Francis Parkman (1823-1893) at this breakfast [MTNJ 2: 359n11]. Parkman, an American historian, is best known as the author of The Oregon Trail.

Sam’s speech ran in the Boston Daily Advertiser on Dec. 4 [Camfield, bibliog.]. Another article ran in the Brooklyn Eagle, page 2, describing the Holmes breakfast:

That inexhaustible post prandial speaker, Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, whom it is so hard to think of as having any other name than Mark Twain, well expressed this universal familiarity with Dr. Holmes’ productions when he narrated his unconscious plagiarism of the dedication of his “Innocents Abroad” from one of the Doctor’s early volumes of poems.