December 30 Sunday – The New York Times, p.2 in a display ad for the North American Review, listed January’s issue, headed by Mark Twain’s, “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us.” 

This is a witty and trenchant rejoinder, in the famous humorist’s best style, to the Frenchman’s criticisms of Americans and American institutions now appearing in “Outre Mer.”

December 31 Monday

December, late – Sam heard a story summarized by the American wife of the Danish Ambassador to the US, the story from The Minister of Veilby, an 1829 novel by Steen Steensen Blicher. In his footnote at the beginning of Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) Sam wrote that he took “the incidents of this story…from an old-time Swedish criminal trial,” adding some important details. But it was not a Swedish trial but a Danish one [Gribben 74; Gerber, MT Encyc. 741]. Note: One possibility for Sam hearing this story is Dec. 22, when Sam went to a masked ball. Following Gerber’s sources, Essays Offered to Herbert Putnam, etc. (1921) gives the following:

There is but one American lady who married a northern diplomat at a time when she could possibly have known Mr. Clemens, or at least could have known him personally. The lady is Anna Lillie Greenough, who, as Mrs. Moulton, married Johan Henrik Hegermann-Lindecrone (1838-1918), Ambassador from Denmark to the United States from 1872 to 1880 [87]. (Editorial emphasis.)