February 19 Saturday – The Hartford Courant reported that the 60,000 copy of Innocents Abroad had been printed, some 45,000 sold [MTL 4: 78n1]. An article attributed to Sam, “Nasby’s Lecture,” was printed in the Buffalo Express [McCullough 153].

The San Francisco News-Letter, “Town Crier” page, carried a snide blurb about Sam’s marriage:

Mark Twain, who, whenever he has been long enough sober to permit an estimate, has been uniformly found to bear a spotless character, has got married. It was not the act of a desperate man—it was not committed while laboring under temporary insanity; his insanity is not of that type, nor does he even labor—it was the cool, methodical, cumulative, culmination of human nature working in the heart of an orphan hankering for some one with a fortune to love—some one with a bank account to caress. For years he has felt this matrimony coming on. Ever since he left California there has been an undertone of despair running through all his letters like the subdued wail of a pig in a wash-tub [Tenney 3].