August 27 Saturday – The Clemens family left Bad Ischl, Austria and traveled the 174 miles to Vienna, where they arranged housing for the winter with the Krantz Hotel. They then traveled back in Kaltenleutgeben, arriving in the evening [Aug. 28 to Rogers].

The Pall Mall Gazette’s piece by Carlyle G. Smythe ran in the N.Y. Times as “Mark Twain’s Literary Taste,” p. BR567:

Roughly speaking, I may say that Mr. Clemens reads anything in prose that is clean and healthy, yet he has never been able to find a line in Thackeray which interested him. Addison and Goldsmith are thrown away upon him, and Meredith, perhaps not unnaturally, provokes him to laughter. I asked Mr. Clemens one day how he explained this indifference to the acknowledged master craftsmen in his own trade. The explanation candidly given was: “I have no really literary taste and never had.”

Academy (London) ran a brief reply to Smythe’s article, that he belabored the point that Twain was more than a humorist: “Who, it may be asked, doubted it?” [Tenney 28].