March – Sam inscribed a note “To Miss Julie / With regards & kindest remembrances of / Mark Twain / (Known to the police as S.L. Clemens.) / Hartford Mch 1883I” [MTP]. No further identification is given.

Lawrence Barrett wrote a short note to Sam: “Hutton tells me you will meet the ‘Kinsmen’ Monday Eve—Pray arrange also to be with me at the [Ludwig] Barnay Breakfast—It will bolster me up—in my first appearance as President” [MTP].

Sam gave a speech at The Kinsmen Club, New York City. According to Paul Fatout,

“The Kinsmen was a club without dues, clubhouse, officers or bylaws, its only purpose being good fellowship and good times—perhaps not a club at all. It was instigated by Lawrence Barrett, the name suggested by Laurence Hutton (1843-1904) to symbolize practitioners of kindred arts who made up the membership…Mark Twain attended as the guest of Hutton in 1883. Other Kinsmen, American and British, were William Mackay Laffan, [William Dean] Howells [in Europe at this time], F[rank] D. Millet, [T. B.] Aldrich, , Edwin A. Abbey, Anthony Hope, Edwin Booth, [Brander] Matthews (1852-1929), Joseph Jefferson, [Augustus] Saint-Gaudens, [Arthur Wing] Pinero, Bram Stoker, Forbes Robertson, John Singer Sargent, Henry Irving, Julian Hawthorne, Andrew Lang, and Edmund Gosse. See Hutton, Talks in a Library: 326-28; Matthews, The Tocsin of Revolt: 255.” [Editorial emphasis]

Note: A search of a five year period in the New York Times shows no mention of a Kinsmen Club, which suggests these men met privately and informally. Brander Matthews’ 1917 book, in These Many Years, reveals the genesis and development of the club: Dining at the Florence House in New York on Apr. 3, 1882, the group of Abbey, Barrett, Hutton, Millet, and Laffan decided to call themselves the Kinsmen Club; they met again at Hutton’s in Mar. 1883 for only second time, adding Bunner, Osgood, Elihu Vedder, and Samuel Clemens; their third meeting was in London during the summer of 1883; in 1887 a “misunderstanding” occurred and the club never met again [232-3].