May 28 Thursday – At 10 a.m. in Krugersdorp, Mrs. G. Seymour drove Sam and Smythe to the train station. From Sam’s notebook about Mrs. Seymour and the ride to the station:

She is small & gentle & womanly, but she has abundance of fire & nerve; drove me to the station 10 am May 28, Thursday with a pair of horses over a rough & rocky & guttered road — drove like Satan; how she kept her seat I don’t know; it would have been a hard drive for me, only I was in the air the main part of the time & the air at Krudersdorp [sic] is very thin & soft on account of the great altitude. Nothing else saved me from having my spine driven out at the back of my head like a flagstaff. It reminded me of the man who was run away with, in an ox-cart over a stumpy road [Parsons, “Traveler in S.A.” 20].

Sam and Smythe left at 10:16 a.m. for Johannesburg, where they met and took a ride around town with Poultney Bigelow in the carriage of a German friend of Bigelow’s.

In the evening Sam gave his “At Home” lecture (No. 2) at the Masonic Hall, on Jeppe Street. Review published on May 29 in Standard and Diggers’ News (excerpt below). After the lecture Sam went to supper with Poultney Bigelow to Bigelow’s German friend at a “sumptuous bachelor house…supper & comfortable fire (cold night) & hot whiskey & cigars.” Parsons writes that Sam admitted, “I have a base taste,” and liked Indian and Burmese cigars — Boer tobacco, too, which “swells up & tumbles out & is always burning holes in your clothes” [“Traveler in S.A.” 20]. Sam returned to his rooms at the Grand National Hotel [Philippon 18]. 

From Johannesburg Standard & Diggers’ News, May 29, 1896, p.5:

To say that Mark Twain has kept the good wine till the last would be a manifestly unfair statement of the position, seeing that each of his lectures has been a masterpiece in its way; but certainly the best wine of his marvelous cellar was supplied to the packed audience of fashionables which occupied the Masonic Hall, Jeppe-street, last night, when the farewell lecture of the series was announced to be delivered ….

…Finally, he came to the Reform business. He had been to Pretoria, and saw the Reformers gathered there in the charge of the Government, and it seemed to him such a pity to see all that energy and talent and nerve-power and will-power and all those multitudinous capacities — (immense applause) — locked up even for a trifling time — (renewed applause) — lost to this wonderful country with its great mines, the richest in all the world. To carry on the work without them was something like running the cyanide process without the cyanide. (Hear, hear, and applause.) [MTJ (Spring 2002) 42, 44].