June 4 Friday – Sam paid a $4.37 bill to Solomon & DeLeeuw, Hartford tobacco dealers for two dozen corn cob pipes and tobacco [MTP]. Was Sam really smoking this many corn cob pipes? They do burn out after a time; he may have been passing them to friends at such gatherings as his Friday Evening Club.

“A Boy’s Adventure,” which Sam and Howells referred to as the “whipping boy story,” ran in the number four issue of the Hartford Bazar Budget (Paine called this “a little special-edition sheet printed in Hartford” [MTB 719].

Note: only 100 copies were printed: www.libraries.wvu.edu/exhibits/twain/boys/index.htm). This piece was in the original manuscript of P&P, but Sam removed it upon the advice of Howells, who did not find it amusing and felt it did not fit the tone of the book. Some scholars have argued Sam should not have removed it, and have pointed to its thematic connection to the rest of the work. The June 5 Hartford Courant, in reporting on the last day of the four-day Bazar commented on this work:

Number four of the Bazar Budget proved fully up to the average excellence of the former numbers. It contained a poem “Without a Word,” by Francis Louise Bushnell; “A Boy’s Adventure,” by Mark Twain, in his peculiar style; “A Jewell of Inconsistency,” a war reminiscence, by the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell; an instructive New York letter on bric-a-brac and art stories, and an interesting short sketch of “Hartford, Old and New,” by the Rev. N.J. Burton. The number is full of news and gossip about the bazaar…