July 13 Monday – Sam gave his final South African “At Home” lecture at the Claremont Town Hall, about seven miles south-southeast of Cape Town. This was a repeat of his No. 1 program. In the evening he was a guest of the Owl Club at Roux’s Masonic Hall in Cape Town. Parsons writes,

This was a special social meeting arranged by fifty Owls for about 150 guests. Songs by the Angelus Quartet, instrumental solos, recitations, and conjuring tricks had been following each other for an hour when “the prince of humourists” and his tour manager arrived at ten-thirty. Then things began to move. The American was presented an album of sixty views of Cape scenery, and his health was drunk — with Livy’s and Clara’s thrown in [“Clubman in S.A” 254].

Note: Photographic views of Cape Town, South Africa (1896) presented with this date inscribed [Gribben 127].

Parsons also gives Sam’s remarks to the club:

I am glad to see the American flag placed on the platform — a flag symbolic of liberty and constitutional Government, which this colony and the land of my birth conjointly enjoy. [This first anniversary] of my lecture pilgrimage — a pilgrimage in which I hope I have given as much pleasure as I have received — is an occasion of parallels, for it is my hope that this will be my last appearance on any platform. I gave the first lecture of my present tour on the 13th of July, 1985, in Elmira, New York, before an audience of 700 men, who, like the audience I see before me, had made their mark in the world, intelligent men who had done something to bring their name before the world like the gentlemen here present. There is one little point I must not forget to mention, which is that my first audience was — in a penitentiary. (Loud laughter.) But there the comparison ends. For whilst those men are expiating their crimes, the gentlemen in front of me have not even commenced to repent of theirs. (Laughter.) ….I shall always remember with pleasure the evening I have spent with my friends, this noble assembly of unclassified convicts. (Laughter and cheers.)

During the evening the prime guest had been treated to “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Three Times Three.” Yet to come were “Auld Lang Syne” and “God Save the Queen,” in which Mark “most heartily joined.” After the sexagenarian celebrity had been with the Owls for two hours, the affair broke up and Mark got back to his hotel bed [253-4].