November 24 Monday – Thomas Nast invited Sam to spend time with him since Sam and Cable were to lecture in Morristown, New Jersey on Thanksgiving eve.

“Or, if you cannot spend so much time here we can give you a substantial tea at six or seven. Do you require reinforcing after the lecture is over? That was always my hungry time” [MTP].

In the evening, Sam and Cable gave a reading in Congregational Church, Washington, D.C. Included: “King Sollermun,” “Tragic Tale of the Fishwife,” “A Trying Situation,” “Col. Sellers in a New Role,” “Encounter with an Interviewer” and “A Ghost Story” [MTPO].

Afterward Cable wrote to his wife Lucy:

A crowded house that went off like gunpowder the moment it was touched; a delicious audience. The brightest, quickest, most responsive that we have yet stood before….When I arrived in town the local manager told me he had between 12 and 15 requests for me to sing Zizi. The audience encored it; but I gave them “Mary’s Night Ride” & then they encored that, & I sang Aurore. How I love to read the Night Ride; but it is a good half-day’s work crowded into seven minutes… [Turner, MT & GWC 61].

Sam wrote from Washington, D.C. to Livy:

Splendid times, Livy dear! A Congregational church packed with people—$750 in the house. The most responsive audience you ever saw. We did make them shout, from the first word to the last. I say “we,” for the honors were exactly equal—as they pretty much always are, now. I worked the ghost story right, this time, & made them jump out of their skins.

Sam wrote of playing billiards with Robert Allen, his “vast supper at 10.40 this evening” and thanked the children for their letters [MTP].

Sam also wrote to George Iles, that it was:

“…no use—all our efforts have failed, & we can’t get to Montreal this year” [MTP].

Webster & Co. per Frederick J. Hall sent Clemens a statement of a/c [MTP].