February ca. – Sam wrote, likely from New York, to decline an invitation to be present for the 400th anniversary of the founding of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The school was founded in Feb. 1495 [MTP].

February – Sometime during the month in New York, Sam responded on Players Club stationery to William H. Rideing’s Jan. 23 request for an essay for Youth’s Companion.

I got your telegram to-day & answered it. We are still hunting for that Shelley MS., & if it is found I will send it to you. Otherwise, when I get to Europe (I sail in the New York March 7), I will send to Florence & get the original MS & re-edit it & type-write it & forward to you for inspection.

Sam suggested that in the near future Rideing could use the “Jumping Frog” story in the North American Review. He needed time on “How to Tell a Story” for the Companion, and suggested a name change to “The Etiquette of Story-Telling,” or some such, “so that I shan’t be shoving myself forward as a recognized expert in the art” [MTP].

Sam’s notebook:

“Ships that Pass in the Night. Get 2 — send one to Paris” [Gribben 294; NB 33 TS 53]. Note: refers to Beatrice Harraden’s Ships That Pass in the Night (1894). Also in this month or March: “Stanley’s Interpreter’s Account of the Meeting between Stanley and Livingston — get it out of the courant” [NB 33 TS 56].

The third of seven parts from PW ran in the Feb. issue of Century Magazine. The fourth of six installments of Tom Sawyer Abroad appeared in the Feb. 1894 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine.

Not everyone was a Mark Twain fan. Martha McCulloch Williams edited Southern Magazine which ran “In Re ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson,” p.99-102. The article described the book PW as “tremendously stupid,” and “malicious and misleading” [Tenney 23]. Note: So much for Southern sensibilities.