July 28 Saturday – Isabel Lyon’s journal:

Jean, 10:45, violent. 6:40, long, violent. Petit mal all day.

The King is singing the Marseillaise in lusty tones as he is drawing a bath for himself. When the King sings very hard it means a perturbation of spirit; it means that something is not quite in key, it never stands for happiness.

This morning Mr. Clemens went to work on the porch & kept at it until 2 o’clock. The kittens bothered him with their friendliness until Katherine was called upon to cart them off. When I went to my study later, on the desk I found 8 closely written pages of ms., a speech—Mr. Clemens explained to me at dinner—a speech to be given at a press banquet sometime in September. A speech in which he is taking up cudgels for Standard Oil. It seems that when he was in N.Y. Mr. Melville Stone asked him to do just this thing & as Mr. Rogers’s intimate friend Mr. Clemens felt that he could not do it, and brought forward many sane reasons for not doing it, but Mr. Stone could see only the fact that he wanted Mr. Clemens to make that speech & make it so that it would attack the press for “muckraking” every corporation [MTP TS 100- 101; mention by Gribben, p. 592].

Samuel Hopkins Adams for Collier’s Weekly wrote to Sam that at last he was ready to take up the Oppenheimer matter, and would “probably have the article ready for Collier’s of September 28 or thereabout.” Did Sam have any other material on hand that might be of value? [MTP].

Charles J. Langdon wrote to Sam acknowledging his check from Miss Lyon for $304.33 which he had forwarded with his for $608.67 to pay the taxes of $913 on the Buffalo real estate [MTP].