March 10 Friday – In Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Auguste Wilbrandt-Baudius (Mrs. Adolf von Wilbrandt).
“I am rested-up again, & am young again; & as my first pleasure I wish to thank you in the best & heartiest words for taking half my burden off my shoulders, & for so stirring the hearts of those people with the beauty & pathos of your reading; & for saying those gracious things of me.”
Sam asked if she would send the lines so he might keep them for memory’s sake [MTP]. Note: Sam had shared the platform with Auguste on Mar. 8. See entry.
Sam gave a charity reading of his sketch “The Lucerne Girl,” to a fashionable audience. He described how he had been interviewed and ridiculed. A fragment of his introduction survives under the chapter title, “A New German Word” Mark Twain’s Speeches, 1910, p. 55; the complete text is lost:
I have not sufficiently mastered German to allow my using it with impunity. My collection of fourteen-syllable German words is still incomplete. But I have just added to that collection a jewel—a valuable jewel. I found it in a telegram from Linz, and it contains ninety-five letters:
Personaleinkommensteurschatzungskommissionsmitgliedsreisekostenrechnungserganzungdrevisionsfund.
If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep beneath it in peace.
Joe Twichell wrote to Sam, including a clipping from the Christian Science Sentinel of Mar. 2, p.15.
“Dear Mark: / I have found it difficult to get your Christian Science questions answered; and in the case of some of them impossible.” He wrote of his wife questioning a practitioner of the faith who could not answer all, but who referred them to a clerk in the C.S. church in Boston. On Mar. 6 he then wrote to the C.S. publishing Society and rec’d back a typed note (he enclosed to Sam) that they had “no publication with the information you desire.” He then referred to a male C.S. practitioner in Hartford and was told that the course of instruction at the Metaphysical College in Boston was two weeks at the cost of $100. The Twichells had traveled to S. Carolina to see their son David, who was in the Army. Their daughter Harmony was doing well as a nurse [MTP]. Note: Joe’s letter is obviously a reply to one not extant from Clemens, who had asked several questions about Christian Science.