January 4 Wednesday – The Aberdeen (S.D.) Daily News, p. 2, “Mark Twain’s Pranks” reported reminiscences by Captain H. Lacy, who was born in Hannibal in 1839. Lacy claims it was not Jim Wolfe who was the victim of the famous skeleton-in-bed prank (sometime in the 1840s), but “a tramp printer named Snell,” who “blew into Hannibal one day and was given work on the paper.” Lacy claimed to be along on the prank; his account offers not only adifferent victim than has been imagined (see MTL 1: 18n4; also Ch. 23 TA) but a different outcome:
He was an uncommunicative sort of fellow, but a good worker and obedient. Sam decided to bring him out of his reserve and to do it borrowed a skeleton from a doctor’s office and slipped it into the printer’s bed. Then we got around to a window about bedtime to see what was going to happen. The print pulled off his shoes, piled his clothes over on the floor and blew out the light. The next thing we supposed would be a yell and a printer shooting out of the window in his nightshirt. But there wasn’t anything of the sort. There was a sleepy yawn and:
“Get over on your own side, darn you.”
We heard the ghastly bedmate of Snell fall to the floor, and then everything was quiet except for the snoring of the sleeping printer. The joke had failed, and we went up to our rooms in disgust.
Next day Snell didn’t show up, and we began to feel a little hopeful that maybe the trick had worked after all. But we were again disappointed. Snell was in a gin mill, boiling drunk and having the time of his life.
“Killed er man deader’n a red Injun,” he yelled, “an’ shell corpsus fer dollar an’ sheventy-five! Wow!”
“He had rolled the skeleton up in a sheet and sold it to another doctor!”
Sam’s notebook:
Mr. C. Lewinhaupt
Hotel Monticello
35 W. 64 st
1390 Columbus (tel) [NB 47A TS 2]. Note: Swedish Count C. Lewenhaupt gave Sam osteopathic treatments beginning Mar. 25, 1905 for $2 per treatment. Lewenhaupt had been Henrick Kellgren’s assistant in Sanna, Sweden, and likely met Clemens while the two men were in Vienna [C. Anderson 85]. See Lyon’s journal for that date. See also a letter Clemens wrote to Count Claes Lewenhaupt for a dinner invite on Oct. 21, 1887 (vol. II).
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “Today Mr. Clemens has not felt so well. His wretched nights full of gout, make his days full of a dull misery. The weather has been very cold. Much snow has fallen and I have spent many hours among the books collected from many quarters of the world” [MTP: TS 36].
Frank David Woollen wrote from Dayton, Ohio to Sam, offering “a friendly word in passing from a stranger,” after losing his wife at a young age. He enclosed a verse he’d written, “Day’s End” [MTP].