March 21 Monday – By his letter of Mar. 20 to Rogers, Sam seemed anxious to go to the reopening session of the Austrian Parliament this afternoon. In his Mar. 23 to Rogers he confirmed that he went:

“I was present at the opening of Parliament, but it was peaceable & dull; so I have not been there since.”

This was also the day the contract for Sam’s American option on Szczepanik’s Raster machine was to be signed before a notary [MTHHR 335]. Dolmetsch points out the hard truth of what Sam was up to:

Ironically, this was no victory at all. Although he could not foresee it, not negotiating immediate sale of his option to his competitor [William M. Wood] was another huge error in Clemens’s business judgment… Lacking capital of his own with which to speculate, Clemens had gambled this time on Henry Rogers’s backing to obtain and profitably sell the rights to Szczepanik’s machines, and he was headed for disappointment [201].

Sam attended a meeting of the English-French Conversation Club, where Miss Alice Potter had been scheduled to read two Mark Twain selections, “The Californian’s Tale,” and “Adam’s Diary.” Dolmetsch writes that Sam had been invited as a “guest of honor,” but was not obligated to read. “Twain nevertheless volunteered to present his two selections himself much to the delight of the assemblage. How Miss Potter felt about it, however, the newspapers neglected to report” [146].