November 21 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Charles Webster about cleaning up loose ends with Sam’s ex-lawyer, Charles Perkins.
“About Christmas you may go to Mr. Perkins & get all documents & everything connected with my business—so that Mr. Perkins’s salary can stop with the year.
“Let him explain the Western loans, the Raymond contract, &c. And next time, we’ll watch Mr. R.” [MTBus 204]. Note: The last implies Sam felt that John T. Raymond, too, had cheated him.
Karl & Hattie J. Gerhardt wrote to Sam and Livy about their $3,000 limit, items that cost more, and their progress [MTP].
Joe Twichell wrote (Hibbard to Twichell Nov. 18 enclosed): “I sympathize with this fellow-minister, and really couldn’t say ‘no’ to the record request he made me, it seemed a little thing to ask and to grant.” He sent both Hibbard’s letters; he agreed to go to Williamburg with Sam and stay the night of the lecture or reading [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Twichell & Minister concerning a charity reading”
The New York Times reprinted an article from the Philadelphia Press, “Mark Twain’s Barometer”:
Somebody was asking a Hartford man how it happened that Mark Twain wrote and published so little nowadays. “He writes as much as ever,” was the reply, “but his barometer is out of order, and he does not know what to publish: so he publishes nothing.”
“What in the world has his barometer to do with his literary activity?”
“His barometer is a man-servant named Jacob, who is remarkable for his deficient sense of humor. Mark never can judge of the merit of his own performances. Years ago he fell into the habit of testing everything that he wrote by observing its effect on Jacob. If Jacob listened to the reading of the article, jest, or story with unmoved countenance, or merely smiled in a perfunctory way, Mark was satisfied and sent the manuscript to the printer. But if Jacob laughed outright, or gave any other indication of genuine merriment, the humorist concluded that the stuff was hopeless and withheld it from publication. He regarded Jacob as infallible, and came to lean upon his judgment.”
[Note: Jacob may have been George Griffin, the family man-servant for many years. That Sam used George as a “reverse” sounding board in this way is likely an exaggeration, but Sam may have read an article or two to his eccentric butler. See also Louis J. Budd’s, Our Mark Twain p.76; Budd calls this article “in the dying vein of apocrypha,” and a “retreaded forgery” that “surely did not fool those with any feeling for Twain’s genius…”]