December 6 Monday – Sam’s article “MARK TWAIN’S IDEA OF A GOOD LETTER” was reprinted in the Grass Valley, California, Daily National. Sam’s niece, Annie Moffett’s letter was the object of Sam’s admiration [Fatout, MT Speaks 58-9].

William F. West, Horatio C. King & Lorin Palmer wrote:

Dear Sir,

As you will perhaps remember, the lecture committee of the “Plymouth Young People’s Association” desired to secure your services, for a lecture to be delivered, during the present month, in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. Your agent in Boston wrote us some two weeks ago, that you were to lecture in Brooklyn, Dec. 1st and again Dec 6th, and would prefer not to engage yourself for a third time. Seeing your card, however, in the Brooklyn evening papers of Saturday last, we thought you might, perhaps, be induced to change your answer previously given us.

If you can lecture for us any night of this or next week, we would be pleased to have you communicate with either of us, as below.

Yours truly,
Wm. F. West
31 Mercer St, near Grand
Horatio C. King
38 Wall St.
Lorin Palmer 170 Water St [MTPO].

Sam wrote from New York to James Redpath about the above letter:

I talked with Horatio C. King about this but I didn’t want to lecture in Brooklyn any more, & so I told him I had no night open.

This is the very society I thought that infernal woman was representing. This is the Society I have long been wanting to talk for & King & I have often tried to fix a date & never could before.

But I’ve got enough. I never will lecture outside of New England again—& I never will lecture in Brooklyn at all. I’m just beat out with that most infernal Mite Society. I published a card in the Brooklyn papers saying I would not be present at the Brooklyn Atheneum to-night. I am to blame from the very start—& NOBODY ELSE. I have done all this on my own responsibility—I shoulder it all.

Mark.

Suspend judgment, Redpath, till you see me. We were both mistaken about that Miss Wason’s Mite Society. If she writes complainingly to you, tell her you are authorized by me to pay the expense she has been at if it is not over fifty dollars—& that is all the reparation you know how to make. (She did no advertising, & that was one thing I was so outrageously mad about. She put in one square (marked eod ie. “every other day”) in the least circulated Brooklyn paper, & not a line in any other—& she made that ad. read as if I was talking on my own hook & for no society—a public independent mountebank in an unused barn of a theatre up a back street.) Excuse me from talking in any such place.

Mark

Snowing & blowing—this is the worst night you ever saw—I am glad I just saved myself [MTL 3: 419-20; MTPO].

By the evening of this day, Sam was in Boston, at the annual dinner of the Boston Press Club. After dinner, Sam went with others to Selwyn’s Theatre, where he saw Lady Audley’s Secret from a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862), her most successful work. Sam used Boston as his base during November, while lecturing in New England.

Sorin Palmer wrote to Sam [MTP]. Note: Vic Fischer at MTP says this is a “ghost letter,” that is, referred to somewhere but with no known text. It is included in case the text should ever surface.