November 29 Sunday – Sam wrote to Frank R. Stockton, thanking him for his good wishes [AMT 2: 576].

The Critic ran affectionate essays by Charles Dudley Warner, Oliver Wendell Holmes (a poem), Joel Chandler Harris, and Frank P. Stockton on the eve of Sam’s 50th birthday. These were reprinted in many newspapers, even in the London Pall Mall Gazette of Dec. 12, 1885.

Warner: You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will find it not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will slip away much faster than those just accomplished. After all, a century is not much, and I wouldn’t throw it up to you now, only for the chance of saying that few living men have crowded so much into that space as you, and few have done so much for the entertainment and good fellowship of the world.

An excerpt of Holmes’ verse:

So fifty years have fled, they say,
Since first you took to drinking,—
I mean in Nature’s milky way,—
Of course no ill I’m thinking. [see AMT 2:263-4 for the entire text].

Harris: I saw Mr. Twain (says Mr. Harris) not so very long ago piloting a steamboat up and down the Mississippi river in front of New Orleans, and his hand was strong and his eye keen. Somewhat later I heard him discussing a tough German sentence with Little Jean—a discussion in which the toddling child probably had the best of it…I am glad he is fifty years old. He has earned the right to grow old and mellow. He has put his youth in his books, and there it is perennial.

Sam wrote a letter of thanks from Hartford to the four men, addressing it to “My dear Conspirators.” Their essays had reconciled him:

“…to being fifty years old….May you live to be fifty yourselves, & find a fellow-benefactor in that time of awful need” [MTP]. Note: see AMT 2: 258-60.

He then wrote individual letters of thanks, especially thanking Joel Chandler Harris for the “good word about Huck” he’d written.