February 27 Tuesday – In New York on Players Club stationery, Sam wrote to James B. Pond, who evidently read about Sam’s appearances with James Whitcomb Riley at Madison Square Garden and asked if he’d like to make ten appearances for him.
Oh, I’m just doing this to give Riley an advertisement. I sail for France eight days hence, & I’ve got to go; otherwise I would do the 10 nights for you [MTP].
Sam also finished his Feb. 25 and 26 letter to Livy, referring to her Feb. 14 letter to H.H. Rogers (also sent to Sam) as “just right” — he’d enclose it in a note and arrange for Rogers to receive it after he sailed on Mar. 7 so as to “spare him embarrassment.” Sam wrote of Rogers’ insistence on helping to meet with the Century or the Cosmopolitan in a sale of Webster & Co. assets, and thus of making an appointment for them for the day after tomorrow, Mar. 1. Sam ended the long letter with a realization that time was slipping away from him:
Great Scott! I am due at his house [Rogers] in 20 minutes — to dine & then go down with some of the family to my public reading [MTP].
After dining at the Rogers’ home, Sam went with some members of the Rogers family to Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, where Mark Twain, James Whitcomb Riley and Douglass Sherley (1857-1917), known as “The Kentucky Story Teller,” gave their second night’s reading [MTP; Fatout, Lecture Circuit 235;]. Note: Riley and Sherley had been on a lecture tour ending here in N.Y.
The New York Times, February 27, 1894 p.4:
Mark Twain’s Old Stories.
The motive that prompts men and women to attend an entertainment in which Mark Twain figures as a star attraction is not to be misconstrued. They want to be amused. Their minds are made up for an evening of laughter. Having set themselves in that purpose, nothing can turn them from it — not even Mark Twain. Last night’s audience at the concert hall of the Madison Square Garden turned out to look, hear, and laugh. It executed that intention thoroughly, while Mark Twain loitered through several of his back numbers. He prefaced his story of “The Jumping Frog” by saying that it was twenty-nine years old, while “Oudinot,” his second number, was aged but twenty-seven years. The audience listened to him with as close attention and was convulsed with determined merriment as completely as if the frog’s handicap of five pounds of shot snugly stuffed into its interior, and the story of a man who led a blast skyward for half an hour, and was docked wages for time lost, had come off the humorist’s reel for the first time. He responded to demands for more with his Washington’s Birthday speech at Farmingham and the stammering story.
[Note: Fatout reports on this two-night affair in MT on the Lecture Circuit, p.235; MTHHR, 128n2 uses Fatout to conclude Sam “had not been well received” — Sam himself wrote to Rogers Feb. 3, 1895 calling these appearances “unspeakable botches.”
Frederick J. Hall dictated a typed letter to Sam:
I have been thinking very carefully over the Cosmopolitan proposition. Of course Walker’s offer was put in a general way and there would be details to settle. But I am certain that his offer is a very good one and, I believe, the best solution of the present difficulty.
Hall asked if Sam could arrange a meeting for him with H.H. Rogers, and noted that while he did not “for a moment pretend” to equate his business judgment with Rogers’, he did have a detailed knowledge of the book business, which Rogers lacked [MTP].
T.G. Sawkins wrote suggesting Sam write a book about Australia, since “there was no likelihood of enticing” him to visit, and that a book about a country one had never visited might be a novelty! [MTP].