September 26 Sunday – Sam was in Buffalo. He began a letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks, saying he couldn’t come see her until spring due to lectures, but “if Livy invites you you will come to our wedding, won’t you?”  He wrote also about Charles Langdon’s planned trip [MTL 3: 358-9].

Reigstad amplifies Clemens’ week:

For Mark Twain, the week beginning Sunday, September 26, 1869, his sixth at the Express, was hectic. At week’s end he started an extended hiatus from Buffalo. Before leaving town, he hustled to fulfill his many Express responsibilities. Monday’s edition saw the last of his People and Things compilations. That same day he followed Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s seventh child, around Buffalo during a last-minute visit and wrote a report on it. By the middle of the week, he found himself alone in charge of editorial matters. Joe Larned had departed for Wednesday’s state Republican convention in Syracuse [57].

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

Dear Mr. Clements [sic],

I don’t see what excuse you had for sending me such a great big book, which would have cost me ever so many dollars, but I assure you it was very welcome in spite of that—more welcome than you could have guessed it would be, for independently of the pleasure I have had from your other writings, and the agreeable recollection of your visit to my house in company with Mr Locke, some parts of your travels had a very special interest for me. I may mention especially your visits to Palestine and Egypt. You looked at these two countries in a somewhat different way it is true, from Dr Robinson, or Lepsius, but I always like to hear what one of my fellow-countrymen who is not a Hebrew scholar or a reader of hieroglyphics, but a good humored traveller with a pair of sharp twinkling Yankee (in the broader sense) eyes in his head, has to say about the things that learned travellers often make unintelligible and sentimental ones ridiculous or absurd. Not long ago I read Hepworth Dixon’s book about the Holy Land and since that Lady Herbert’s. What a different way they had of looking at things to be sure. I am tolerably familiar with other books on the East and I have a large collection of stereographs of Egypt and Palestine—one of the largest I think that anybody has about here. So you can imagine with what curiosity I followed you through scenes that were in a certain sense familiar to me and read your familiar descriptions and frequently quaint and amusing comments, from such an entirely distinct and characteristic point of view.

I was rather surprised and much pleased to find how well your ship’s company got on together. I had an idea they got sick of each other. I once crossed the ocean with another human being occupying the same stateroom—a German, who was well enough, I don’t doubt—but didn’t I loathe the sight and smell of him before our forty two days passage was over!

Well, I hope your booksellers will sell a hundred thousand copies of your Travels—don’t let them get hold of this letter for the rascals always print everything to puff their books—private or not—which is odious but take my word for it your book is very entertaining and will give a great deal of pleasure.

Yours very truly

O W Holmes [MTPO].

Notes from source: Holmes alluded to: William Hepworth Dixon (1821–79), English historian, author of The Holy Land (1865); Edward Robinson (1794–1863), American philologist, geographer, and biblical scholar, author of Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841); Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–84), German explorer and philologist, author of a number of books on Egypt; and Mary Elizabeth Herbert (1822–1911), Baroness Herbert of Lea, translator, novelist, travel writer, and religious biographer, author of Cradle Lands (1867), an account of travels in Egypt and the Holy Land. Clemens and David Ross Locke had visited Holmes in Boston on 14 or 15 March 1869. [Editorial emphasis.]