January 15 Thursday – Cable rose at four in the morning to catch a train, reaching Burlington, Iowa at a quarter to seven. Sam stayed behind in Keokuk to spend more time with his mother, Jane Clemens [Turner, MT & GWC 88]. The Keokuk Gate City ran an article discussing Sam’s lectures and his greetings to his mother [Tenney 14].

Sam wrote from Keokuk to Charles Webster. He included a long list of things for Webster to keep track of—“a list like this, & stick it on the wall where you can see it when you go to bed & when you get up…” Sam wrote of the bed-clamp enterprise, the chapter that Bromfield felt he could give to Rice without waiting on Webster, the “500,000 times” he had said he would “fill no engagement after Feb. 28” with Pond. Sam wanted a weekly report on the list given so that he wouldn’t have to keep asking about each item [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Edmund C. Stedman, giving permission to “take from any book you want to, new or old, good or bad. Huck Finn included.” Evidently, Stedman, at the time a journalist with the New York Tribune and the New York World, had asked for a submission excerpt from Sam. Sam referred him to Howells, who might make a better recommendation [MTP].

Sam arrived late in Burlington due to train problems; Cable spoke for an hour and a half by the time Sam arrived. Their reading was given at the Opera House, Burlington, Iowa. The next day, From the Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye:

When Mark Twain finally appeared, his first task was to explain the delay. He said he had stopped through the day with his mother in Keokuk. She was eighty-two years old; she was the only mother he had; their homes being a thousand miles apart he might never see her again. He thought he could trust the St. Louis train, but his trust was betrayed. It started from Keokuk an hour late, and had been getting an hour later ever since. On the way they broke something. A dispute arose as to what it was that was broken. It took forty minutes to decide the dispute, and five minutes to repair the damage. He detailed his disastrous experience with the German language, wove all the erratic applications of the German genders into the “Tragic tale of the fishwife,” described a “trying situation” in his foreign travels, in which an American young lady whom he fails to recognize, insists upon talking to him about “old times,” etc.

The audience went home in the best of humor. They were charmed by Cable and amused and entertained beyond their expectations by Twain.

Cable wrote on Jan. 17 to his wife Lucy about the Burlington delay:

I have not told you about our evening in Burlington, Iowa. Clemens lingered behind at Keokuk to see his aged mother—from whose fine aged face he gets all his own best lines—and was to reach Burlington just in time for the reading. But the snow storm was tremendous, his train was dreadfully belated and I had to lift a stone-dead audience out of the grave, as it were, and put life & mirth into them & keep their spirits rising for an hour & a half all alone. I did it, however, & when Clemens came into the house at 9/35 my work was much more than done & he had an enthusiasm to start on. I was proud of the job [Turner, MT & GWC 88-9].