May 22 Sunday – In Venice Sam wrote to Frederick J. Hall having received his May 9 letter (not extant), which Sam wrote, “sounds very good.” Sam wanted Mr. Halsey of Wall Street to invest the funds using “his own best judgment”; Sam didn’t want to “meddle.” He cited Susan Crane’s agreement on the matter, which suggests she knew and respected Halsey. Sam also forecasted his return on business matters:
I shall run over home about middle of June & start back to Europe toward end of July. Maybe you can come with me [MTLTP 311].
Sam also wrote to Franklin G. Whitmore, agreeing to have the Hartford greenhouse repaired, and ordering him to get John O’Neil’s estimate of coal needed for the next winter (John and Ellen O’Neil acted as caretakers of the Hartford house). John was selling flowers grown in the greenhouse and doing well — Sam noted, “He seems to have a pretty good market for flowers.”
I shall run over home about the middle of June for a brief stay while Mrs. Clemens takes a course at a German bath. If Mallory’s proposition is still alive I will do something with it if I can on the basis suggested by cable & letter to Henry Robinson, but if that is not possible I shall keep the [Paige typsetter] royalties [MTP].
Sam’s notebook in Venice:
Sunday, May 22/92 — “White line of stones” wh begins in the great Piazza San Marco & conducts you all over Venice & brings you back. When lost cut around till you find the white line, then follow it to St. Mark.
No such thing [NB 31 TS 47].
Another friend of Sam’s ran into him in Venice during this short stay, Robert Underwood Johnson, who later wrote in Remembered Yesterdays of the meeting, and of others with Sam:
In 1892, when Mrs. Johnson and I were in Venice, we had a delightful meeting with Mark in front of one of the restaurants in the Piazza of his patron saint. With us at the table were Mrs. James T. Fields and Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, who were old friends of Mr. Clemens. The great humorist did most of the talking, the others only putting in a few words now and then by way of keeping him going. At this time he was deeply interested in occult things, dreams, second-sight, etc., and I remember that he told us a remarkable story of a trip down the Mississippi River, when he was working as a pilot, including a circumstantial dream which he had, foreshadowing his brother’s death, and how, when he reached his home, the details of the dream were found to be exact. He told it with deep feeling and I felt that we had seen him in one of his very best moods.
He then went on to tell us the history of the little lamp that then burned on the outside of the angle of St. Mark’s, at the entrance of the Doge’s Palace, recounting in a graphic way how a murder had been committed near by early in the morning and how a baker’s boy, who was crossing the Piazzetta at the time, had been arrested and convicted for it, and how, many years afterward, when the murderer had confessed, those who had been responsible for the execution of the boy, by way of penance, had placed this lantern near the spot and had provided a fund to keep it perpetually aflame. This was just the sort of historical picturesqueness that took hold of Mark Twain. Of all men-of-letters he was most conspicuously the man-of-the-world.
During this visit he gave an evening of readings from Browning to a few friends at Danieli’s Hotel, and it struck me that his presentation of the poems, particularly of “Andrea del Sarto”, was remarkable as a sympathetic interpretation of the poet [320-1]. Note: The account of the wrongful execution of the baker’s apprentice would place this gathering at the night after the first gathering and Sam’s subsequent visit to the two lamps on the church. See May 21 account from Sam’s notebook. [Also: Gribben 355; NB 31, TS 47].
According to Susy’s May 16 letter to Louise Brownell, the family was “all up late on the Grand Canal hearing the serenade.”