November 5 Tuesday – Early in the morning, the Mararoa arrived at Bluff, South Island, New Zealand, the country’s southernmost port. Livy and Clara stayed aboard. Sam and Carlyle G. Smythe took a train to Invercargill (pop.10,000). Sam made notes on the “rabbit plague” in N.Z. and on the scenery. Shillingsburg notes that NZ advertisements began on Oct. 31 but until Nov. 4 they did not list date or place for the lectures, suggesting the details were not completed until the last minute.

Sam gave his “At Home” lecture at the Theatre Royal in Invercargill to an overflow crowd, with many turned away. “The audience, after giving him a hearty reception, began to laugh when he started, and so they continued from then till the finish, with a few intervals of rest and relief, mercifully introducted” [At Home 130]. It was reviewed by the Southland Times on Nov. 6 and by the weekly Otago Witness on Nov. 7, which noted “one of the largest audiences that ever paid for admission to any entertainment in Invercargill”:

[Twain] has two or three characteristic poses when on the platform, but the most peculiar one is his habit of nursing his elbow and anxiously pressing his cheek with his hand as if suffering the agonies of an 80-horse power, stump jumping toothache when on the point of slipping out some particularly excruciating absurdity. From the time of his stepping out before the footlights to his leaving, says a contemporary, the lecturer is never guilty of even the ghost of a smile — he is as solemn all the time as a wart on an undertaker’s horse [Shillingsburg, At Home 130-1].

Sam spent the night in Invercargill,