August – Sometime during the family stay at Krankenheil-Tölz, Germany (they left Aug. 21) Sam inscribed a copy of £1,000,000 Bank Note & Other Stories to: Mrs. von Hillern:

To / Frau von Hillern — / from one who has read with pleasure & profoundly admires “Geier-Wally” — / Mark Twain / Krankenheil-Tölz / August, 1893.(Now I’ve gone and left the “Die” out! But I was born careless [ two german words not legible] SLC. ~

[Note: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Geier-Wally: A Tale of the Tyrol (1876). See Gribben 314].

Sam’s notebook carries an entry that he saw Henrik Hertz’s play, King Rene’s Daughter; A Danish Lyrical Drama (translated by Theodore Martin 1880) [Gribben 311; NB 33 TS 25].

The Californian, IV p.403-6 ran “Dan De Quille; Artemus Ward in Nevada.” See Sam’s version, “First Interview with Artemus Ward” in Sketches New and Old [Tenney 21; The Twainian Dec. 1939; Fatout, MT in Va City p.31, 114, 117, 173-4].

Frank R. Stockton wrote “Mark Twain and His Recent Works,” which appeared in Forum magazine, XV, p.673-9 for August. Stockton commented “largely on MT’s humor, praising his ‘courage’ –the audacity of his conceptions and expressions; also praises him as a storyteller, ‘a man of broad sympathies,’ while recognizing that ‘the figure with the tragic mask stalks through much of Mark Twain’s work’” [Tenney 22: Scott: Mark Twain Selected Criticism (1955)].