May 17 Wednesday – Roswell H. Phelps left Hannibal and returned to Hartford. Sam left Hannibal alone aboard the Minneapolis, which stopped at Quincy, Ill. and stopped at Keokuk, Iowa. Sam wrote from Quincy to Livy:

Livy darling, I am desperately homesick but I have promised Osgood, & must stick it out; otherwise I would take the train at once & break for home.

      I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day long, examining the old localities & talking with the grey-heads who were boys & girls with me 30 or 40 years ago. It has been a moving time. I spent my nights with John & Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious & beautiful house. They were children with me, & afterwards schoolmates. Now they have a daughter 19 or 20 years old. Spent an hour, yesterday, with A. W. Lamb, who was not married when I saw him last. He married a young lady whom I knew. And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons & daughters. Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished.

      That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old & bowed & melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery & wrinkled, the fire is gone out in its eyes, & the spring from its step. It will be dust & ashes when I come again. I have been clasping hands with the moribund—& usually they said, “It is for the last time.”

      Now I am under way again, upon this hideous trip to St. Paul, with a heart brimming full of thoughts & images of you & Susie & Bay & the peerless Jean. And so good night, my love [MTLP 419; MTP].

The Minneapolis stopped at Keokuk in the evening and left about 11 p.m. Lorch quoted the Keokuk Daily Constitution of May 18: “Judge Davis, Ed. F. Brownell, Al Patterson, and Dr. J.M. Shaffer went on board to greet him and take him off for an hour or two, while the boat stopped, to talk over old times” [McDermott: 195-6 quoting Lorch: “Lecture Trips and Visits of Mark Twain in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, XXVII (October 1929), 518].

Augustus Saint-Gaudens wrote to Sam, having rec’d a telegram from “the young man I wrote you about (Mr Elnell).” He did not understand the message. Did Sam send the letter “I begged you to write”? [MTP]