November 14 Friday – Boston papers reviewed the performance of the previous evening—The Transcript, the Globe, the Journal, and the Post. The Globe compared Cable to Dickens and praised Twain for his struggle with the German language, his trying conversation with the young lady in the hotel dining room at Lucerne, and his ghost story. On balance, all reviews were positive, although the Post called Cable “amateurish in his manner,” but praised him for his singing of Creole songs [Cardwell 18]. Cable wrote home:

We had a great time last night. Twenty-two hundred people applauding, laughing & encoring, In Music Hall. This morning Clemens & I go out to make a call or two. Tonight we read in Brockton. Tomorrow afternoon & night in Chickering Hall. Our show is a great success.

It isn’t easy to write as Mark Twain is singing “We shall walk through the Valley” [Turner, MT & GWC 59.]

Turner writes of “slack attendance” at the evening reading in Brockton, Mass. and also of the following afternoon in Boston [59]. The Boston Journal ran an account of Sam’s comic remarks to reporters as a way of generating free publicity [Budd, “Interviews” 3].

In Boston, Howells wrote to Sam:

Three of us went to hear you read last night and I think I never enjoyed you more. You were as much yourself before those thousands as if you stood by my chimney-corner grinding away to the household your absence bereaves here. You are a great artist, and you do this public thing so wonderfully well that I don’t see how you could ever bear to give it up. I thought the bits from Huck Finn told the best—at least I enjoyed them the most. That is a mighty good book, and I should like to hear you read it all [MTHL 2: 513].