December 13 Friday – At 3:15 p.m. the Clemens party (including Carlyle G. Smythe) left Wellington, N.Z. on the Union Co.’s Mararoa. “Summer seas and a good ship — life has nothing better” [FE ch. XXXVI 324]. On board was the “damdest menagerie of mannerless children I have ever gone to sea with” [NB 36 TS 2] who raised Sam’s ire — in his notebook he hoped for a heavy storm. Also on board was the manager of the Greenwood Theatrical Co. which had been hauled off the ship on a basket at Gisborne. He expressed that it was hardly worthwhile financially for his troupe to tour N.Z., but they did so for the appreciative audiences. Livy conversed with a carver of Maori gods aboard ship [Shillingsburg, “Down Under” 30; At Home 179-80].

Livy wrote to Joseph J. Kinsey: “(O dear me! How I hate writing on this hotel paper but all the other is packed.)” Livy wrote of the arrival of the books and photographs and “what a delightful time” they had in the Kinsey’s “other house….I write in great haste as we are about starting for the steamer” [MTP].