September 6 Thursday – Isabel Lyon’s journal:

Alone I [illegible word] was driven through the starlight over to the Handasyd Cabots where he & Copeland & Sakaloff & Cummings played for a few people. They are four Kings of tone.

The tormenting torrent of music that those men swept out of their instruments was mighty enough to come from 40 men when they played the first movement of the quartette by Leken, a pupil of Caesar Franck he was & died before he was 24—but no man could live on for long when he could give birth do such sound—to such a composition [MTP TS 117].

Henry Mills Alden for Harper & Brothers wrote to Sam.

Dear Mark: / I received a few weeks ago from Mr. Thomas Rees some manuscripts offered for sale to us, purporting to be copies of “Snodgrass” papers contributed by you some fifty years ago to a newspaper published by his father. I returned them with a letter which I send you a copy—also a copy of a letter I have just received from him. I think you should have cognizance of this correspondence.

      The offer of the manuscripts was accompanied by an affidavit sworn to by Mr Rees, Sr., attesting to your authorship. / Yours faithfully… [MTP]. Note: Sam included this letter in his Sept. 10 A.D. Alden refused to publish the letters as he said in his reply to Rees, as they would be ‘a distinct injury to Mr. Clemens, after he had so utterly and deliberately discarded the earlier pen-name.”

Luther E. Price, correspondent for the London Tribune telegraphed Clemens: “British Premier Campbell Bannerman celebrates seventieth birthday to-morrow the London Tribune requests tribute from you Please wire me care New York Herald” [MTP]. Note: Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836-1908), British Liberal Party politician and Prime Minister of the UK (1905-1908).