April 25 Tuesday – Sam wrote aboard the Gold Dust to Livy. He’d been on deck at 4 AM and watched the sun come up, complete with “cluttering” bullfrogs, aromas of dead fish on the ground, and “marvels of shifting light & shade & color & dappled reflections…bewitching to see” [Powers, MT A Life 460]. The writing would find itself in Huckleberry Finn.

“Our present plan is to stay in Vicksburg all day to-morrow, & then go on to New Orleans—remain there a week & then go straight through to St. Louis on the great steamer “Baton Rouge,” which is commanded by Horace Bixby, who taught me the river, & to whom I owed & paid absolute obedience during a year & a half” [MTP].

In Arkansas City, Ark., Sam wired congratulations to journalist friend John Russell Young on the day of his marriage to Julia E. Coleman, in Hartford [MTNJ 2: 463n110].

 “I send a thousand congratulations & add to them as many regrets that I can not be present” [MTP].

H.J. Gibbs, attorney, wrote from Montreal to ask if Sam might reference the case where Sam successfully prosecuted a man from using “Mark Twain,” “…as a trademark” [MTP].