November 6 Wednesday – Sam and Carlyle G. Smythe left Invercargill headed for Dunedin. On the train Sam was given news of the Melbourne Cup (Nov. 5) where “everybody bet on the wrong horse — a new horse [Auraria] won.” Aboard the train Sam’s notes later were incorporated into his travel book:

lovely summer morning; brilliant sky. A few miles out from Invercargill passed through vast level green expanses snowed over with sheep. Fine to see. The green, deep and very vivid sometimes; at other times less so, but delicate and lovely. A passenger reminds me that I am in “the England of the Far South” [FE ch. XXX 286-7].

At 8 p.m. Sam gave the “At Home” lecture in City Hall, Dunedin, with members of the Presbyterian and Anglican Synods present. Ticket prices were 3, 2 and 1s. Interviews published: “A Chat with Mark Twain” by Malcom Ross, Otago Daily Times; Reviews on Oct. 7: Otago Daily Times; Dunedin Evening Star [Shillingsburg, “Down Under” 22].

Sam’s notebook entry on his concept of natural law, as Gribben notes, “appears to have been influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species:

There is nothing kindly, nothing beneficent, nothing friendly in Nature toward any creature, except by capricious fits & starts; that Nature’s attitude toward all life is profoundly vicious, treacherous & malignant [Gribben 176-7; NB 34 TS 31].

Also in his notebook for the day:

Very valuable books given me by Malcom Ross — among them Old New Zealand [Gribben 449; NB 34 TS 32]. Note: the book by Frederick Edward Maning, pseudonym “A Pakeha Maori.”