January 6 Tuesday – Sam and Cable gave a second reading at Leiderkranz Hall, Louisville, Kentucky. From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Despite the rain there was a large audience at Leiderkranz Hall last night to hear Cable and Mark Twain read. Mr. Cable last year prepared for himself a welcome to Louisville, and the people were ready with a hearty greeting for Mr. Clemens.

Mr. Cable’s selections were familiar to the audience, as was the manner of his interpretation, but they lost none of their charm on this account. “Narcisse” and “Kate Riley” and “Richling” and “Restofalo” delighted every one last night with their strange and fascinating humor, of which one never wearies, but the most striking and effective of the pieces recited by Mr. Cable was “Mary Richling’s Night Ride.” There is no more pathetic, no more moving story in all Mr. Cable has written than that which recounts the weary wandering of “Mary Richling.” Caught in the North when the war broke over the land with her child, whom her husband has never seen, she started for New Orleans, confident she could somewhere pierce the line. One disappointment followed another, but the brave-hearted woman never lost courage. Finally it seemed all obstacles were conquered, and, under the guidance and protection of a spy, she rode through the lines, avoiding the pickets and escaping the scouts. It is this last ride Mr. Cable reads with such dramatic force, and it is wise to repeat it to-night.

Mark Twain’s humor is indescribable, as it is inimitable. His “Tragic Tale of a Fishwife,” in its wild absurdities and extravagant incongruities, was greeted with continuous laughter, the appreciation of the situation, no doubt, being heightened by the recollection that last winter there was in Louisville a professor who promised to teach the German language in six weeks, and in the audience there were several score who once thought they had learned it in that time. Mark Twain promises to-night, in addition to regular programme, to tell the story of the “Jumping Frog.” There should be to-night even a larger audience than on last night, and it is to be hoped those who secure seats in advance will obtain them, and the annoyance experienced last night be avoided [Railton].

After the readings, Sam and Cable went again to the Pendennis Club with Sam’s second cousin by marriage, Colonel Henry Watterson, and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Sam enjoyed a “2-hour supper wich was full of delightful conversation, & also full of tropic enthusiasm over the readings” [Jan. 7 to Livy, MTP]. Cable wrote home that Watterson “didn’t please” him, “Talks shamelessly about getting drunk &c &c.” In a discussion of the “negro question” at the Press Club, Cable observed, “Freedom of speech has yet to come to us of the South” [Turner, MT & GWC 83].

Note: The Pendennis Club was founded in 1881 as a private social club, modeled after English gentlemen’s clubs. Pendennis is the name of Thackeray’s novel..Sometime in the 1880s, the club was the birthplace of the “Old Fashioned,” claimed as the first drink to be called a cocktail.