November 16 Friday – In front of 1,500 people in Platt’s Hall, San Francisco, California, Sam gave a new lecture based on the ride west with Orion. Sam repeated the same tired joke about Horace Greeley (1811-1872) and Hank Monk (1832?-1883) on a stagecoach until the house’s silence crumbled into waves of laughter. Still, this second San Francisco lecture was not as well received as the first on Oct. 2 [Lorch 44]. Lorch writes:
He had yet to fully understand that audiences not only expected to be informed but desired to be informed, and that while they were greatly delighted with his humor, they had at least to feel that they had been instructed in order to believe they had received their money’s worth. No other problem was to give Mark Twain more concern in the tours that followed than precisely this one: how to satisfy his own desire to make his audiences laugh while at the same time satisfying them that they had been instructed [44]. The Alta California had commissioned Sam to act as roving correspondent on a proposed world tour. Sam was aiming at bigger fish than being the “humorist of the Pacific slope” [Sanborn 308; Lennon 154].
Sam’s 25 th and last letter to the Union, dated “Volcano House, June 3d – Midnight THE GREAT VOLCANO OF KILAUEA” ran:
I suppose no man ever saw Niagara for the first time without feeling disappointed. I suppose no man ever saw it the fifth time without wondering how he could ever have been so blind and stupid as to find any excuse for disappointment in the first place. I suppose that any one of nature’s most celebrated wonders will always look rather insignificant to a visitor at first, but on a better acquaintance will swell and stretch out and spread abroad, until it finally grows clear beyond his grasp —becomes too stupendous for his comprehension. I know that a large house will seem to grow larger the longer one lives in it, and I also know that a woman who looks criminally homely at a first glance will often so improve upon acquaintance as to become really beautiful before the month is out. I was disappointed when I saw the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low way-ah) to-day for the first time. It is a comfort to me to know that I fully expected to be disappointed, how ever, and so, in one sense at least, I was not disappointed [Day 291].