May 1 Monday – Sam, Cable and Harris spent the afternoon “at Cable’s red-and-olive cottage, surrounded by orange trees and a garden, on Eighth Street, on the lip of the Garden District” [Kaplan 245]. The crowd of children who’d come to Cable’s house to see their beloved Uncle Remus were shocked to find the red-haired man was white and too shy to read to an audience. Sam and Cable saved the day when they read “Tar Baby” and some of their own stories. “Cable read from the Grandissimes & sketches” [MTP letter to Livy May 2].

In the evening, they were entertained at the home of James Guthrie, a friend of Cable’s, and brother-in-law to David Gray, Sam’s old friend from Buffalo. “There was piano music by some young ladies, Cable sang a Creole song, Clemens read from Innocents Abroad and some unpublished travel sketches, Guthrie recited Shakespeare, and two of Guthrie’s children, a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, played Romeo and Juliet in the balcony scene” [Kaplan 245]. “There was an audience of twenty-five ladies & gentlemen” [MTP letter to Livy May 2].

In Sam’s notebook, most likely an account of morning events:

“Tug Boat ‘W.M. Wood’. Sailed up & down river front for 10 miles. Saw Chalmette Cemetary 5 miles below N. Orleans. 12,600 soldiers of last war buried there. Saw battle ground of 1815 near here” [MTNJ 2: 552].

Note: in footnote 57: According to the “River News” column in the Wednesday 3 May 1882 issue of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, “Capt. Mumf. Wood had Mark Twain on the Wm. Wood yesterday, giving him a sight of our harbor, and at the same time a pleasant ride on one of the finest tugs afloat.”

Tiffany & Co. New York, billed Sam $60 for “12 plates 1 dish”; paid May 14 [MTP].

F.W. Taylor for Danville Illinois Holy Trinity Church wrote to ask Sam if they might “casting the story [P&P] into the form of a drama”[MTP].