August 8 Saturday – Isabel Lyon’s journal:  The King wandered out from dinner tonight to look at a wonderful sunset and he called Benares and me to look at the mighty show. But we were compelled to stop in the great room to look at the slim beautiful white figure of the King standing in an archway of the loggia, with the hills and gorgeous glow of the sunset as a background. Claude went out to ask him to have some cut up peaches, and when the King turned to come in and saw us still in the big room, he plaintively said, “You can’t see it from there.” So I told him we had halted to see the more beautiful picture of himself. We cut the meal short to go out and sit in the archway and watch the sunset that had for its top a great spray of white thin strip-like clouds, and we watched it until the moon came riding high enough to call the west from the sun to herself. All the time the King talked about astronomy—one of his pet subjects, and he and Benares calculated the distances between the stars—and “light years”, and they talked about air ships and the King said, “Oh, I suppose that a hundred years from now people will be sitting in these very arches to watch the air-ships go by.” A few stars were faintly glimmering away up toward the Zenith, and the King said “The sunset is like some Brobdignagian fire Company that is trying to put out the stars” [MTP: IVL TS 57-58]. Note: for the remainder of IVL’s Aug. 8 entry, see Aug. 6, to which it refers.

Julian Hawthorne wrote from the Cambridge Bldg., NYC to Clemens:

My dear Clemens: — / Why should you be surprised to see me going into mining? You have yourself described how Cecil Rhodes took hold of business, when no one suspected it of him. I have not found a shark on the beach in Australia, but, with a few friends of mind, I have found a silver mine in the Cobalt region up in Canada, and we are developing it with a view to living on our dividends….We shall  keep clear of Wall Street, and of all speculation.

Of course, you are rich; but you should consider that it is invidious in a literary man to grow rich from his own profession; and it would allay the feeling against you if it were known that you had made an additional fortune out of silver. Get somebody to read the enclosed prospectus to you, and then act promptly. The stock is sold in bunches of not less than 1000 shares, at a good reduction from face value. We shall close up about the end of September; but I have set my heart on landing you for a purchase.

I am glad to hear that you are a neighbor of my daughter’s up there—which, of course, I could not be  if it were my intention to sell you a gold brick.  

Drop me a line here, and believe me…  [MTP]. Note: IVL wrote on the bottom of the letter for Sam: “I’m not gambling on the mines because I know people sometimes say things about mines that are not true. I used to do it myself when I had mines to sell. But I am gambling on Julian Hawthorne’s integrity & levelheadedness.