June 6 Thursday – The get-together at the Moses Beach house in Brooklyn (Beach was neighbor to Henry Ward Beecher there) came off as planned (See Sam’s June 1 letter to his mother). The New York Sun reported that 70 guests, passengers awaiting departure on the Quaker City, enjoyed an “excellent repast,” and that “Mark Twain …enlivened the company with ebul[l]itions of wit” [MTL 2: 51n2].
In Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. xi, Wecter writes:
On the evening of June 7, 1867, some sixty persons, largely unknown to each other, gathered at 66 Columbia Street, Brooklyn, home of Moses S. Beach, proprietor of the New York Sun. Including the host and his young daughter Emma, they composed the passenger list of the steamship “Quaker City,” scheduled to sail next day for a tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. In the midst of their decorous festivities, a thin man with hawklike nose and curly carrotty hair shuffled forward with an air of melancholy diffidence and drawled, “Captain Duncan desires me to say that passengers for the ‘Quaker City’ must be on board tomorrow before the tide goes out. What the tide has to do with us or we with the tide is more than I know, but that is what the captain says” [Note: editorial emphasis].