March 22 Thursday – They arrived back in Hartford in the evening. Charles Dudley Warner “dropped in” after they arrived home and suggested that George W. Cable give the same reading in Hartford he successfully gave in Baltimore, instead of the planned lecture on “Creole Women.” Sam felt it would be “safer” to give a reading that had proven successful elsewhere [Mar. 23 to Cable, MTP].

In an article in Life, then a humor magazine, a cartoon figure of Mark Twain (by Kendrick) as an alchemist went with a brief, inaccurate biographical sketch:

…He was born on Plymouth Rock, April 1st, 1728…As an archeologist, however, he has won most renown, and his collection of Pompeiian, Sanscrit, Egyptian, and early Greek jokes, now in possession of Osgood & Co., of Boston, is considered the most complete in the world….He is short, florid and very corpulent, and is a rapid and brilliant speaker [Tenney, Supplement American Literary Realism, Spring 1982 p5]. See insert

William L. Alden for Harper & Bros. Wrote that he’d be unhappy without a submission from Sam for his next “Editor’s Drawer” [MTP]. A note in the file gives this the probable date and says Alden was given the feature after William A. Seaver’s death on Jan 7.