December 11 Thursday – Sam “rushed to David Gray’s…with Cable, arrived at noon” and had to wait for his steak to be re-cooked, and so drank two cups of strong coffee that did not agree with him [Dec. 12 to Livy, MTP].

Sam and Cable gave a second reading in Concert Hall, Buffalo, New York.

The Buffalo Times:

A very large and fashionable audience assembled in Concert Hall last night to hear that prince of humor, Mark Twain (Samuel M. Clemens), and that celebrated novelist, George W. Cable, in their joint readings. They went expecting a treat and they got decidedly more than they bargained for. A more delighted, amused, thoroughly satisfied audience never filled the auditorium of any building in Buffalo. Mark Twain, like old wine, or old friends, seems to improve with age, and his dry, unconscious, apparently spontaneous humor kept the audience in convulsions of laughter. With the exception of his first reading, given in the program below, most of the great humorist’s admirers have heard or read the selections he gave last night, but they are of the kind that never grow “stale, flat or unprofitable” by repetition [Railton].

The Buffalo Express, Sam’s old paper:

“Mark Twain,” as an old resident of Buffalo, felt it necessary to renew former acquaintances. He scanned the audience from beneath those heavy brows and said that he missed many faces that he knew so well here fourteen or fifteen years ago. They had gone, gone to the tomb, to the gallows—or to the White House. All of us must at last go to one or another of these destinations, and he advised his audience to be wise and prepare for them all [Railton].

In the evening he met with the Hartford Club of Buffalo for dinner, but,

“…ate not a bite, & spent 2 of the infernalist weariest hatefulest hours that ever fell to my lot” [Dec. 12 to Livy, MTP].