December 19 Friday – Sam, after meeting with Charles Webster, probably headed straight home for Hartford, although no documentation for this date has been found. Upon reaching home, Sam was in store for a surprise.

I returned to Hartford from the far West, reaching home one evening just at dinner time. I was expecting to have a happy and restful season by a hickory fire in the library with the family, but was required to go at once to George Warner’s house, a hundred and fifty yards away, across the grounds. This was a heavy disappointment, and I tried to beg off, but did not succeed. I couldn’t even find out why I must waste this precious evening in a visit to a friend’s house when our own house offered so many and superior advantages. There was a mystery somewhere, but I was not able to get to the bottom of it. So we tramped across in the snow, and I found the Warner drawing-room crowded with seated people. There was a vacancy in the front row, for me—in front of a curtain. At once the curtain was drawn, and before me, properly costumed, was the little maid, Margaret Warner, clothed in Tom Canty’s rags, and beyond an intercepting railing was Susy Clemens, arrayed in the silks and satins of the prince….This lovely surprise was my wife’s work [MTA 1: 59-60].

Jervis Langdon Jr. remembered:

Susy as the Prince, the son of the irascible Henry the Eighth, in that first scene with the Pauper, the son of brutal John Canty, was saying seriously: “Fathers be alike mayhap; mine hath not a doll’s temper,” when someone, I rather think Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, gave an irrepressible giggle, and the whole audience went off into appreciative shouts of laughter. The scene was interrupted, the children were indignant, but Mr. Clemens was highly pleased that the possibility of just such a connection had never struck Mrs. Clemens, who had coached the cast [Salsbury 188].

The family put on the P&P play “a number of times” in their own house to a limit of 84 persons. Sam once took the role of Miles Hendon when Frank Warner “caught a severe cold and could not play it” [Salsbury 189]. Note: Powers mistakenly identifies a March 1, 1885 performance as this pre-Christmas performance [500]. Willis identifies this “surprise play” as pre-Christmas, during Sam’s reading-tour break [160].

To muddy the water slightly, see Mar. 14, 1885 to James B. Pond, which clearly states the surprise play took place on that date. Of course, it may have been a repeat performance. Or, Sam’s memory in his Autobiography may have been faulty once more.