November 6 Saturday – Sam gave a reading before the Hartford Saturday Morning Club. The content of the reading is unknown [Fatout, MT Speaking 657].

Sam wrote to an unidentified person:

When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious early opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, petty much as I think about the “Innocents Abroad.” The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both [MTP].

Sam also wrote to George E. Waring, Jr., personal friend of the late Horace Greeley, and vice president of the Newport, R.I. Republican Club, “was also a prominent consulting engineer for sanitary and agricultural drainage,” who had arranged some work on the Clemens’ home in the spring of 1886 [MTNJ 3: 265n128]. Waring had argued against nominating James G. Blaine in the 1884 election, and had also dabbled in literary writing. Sam confessed that Livy had “condemned” a letter he’d written to his “satisfaction.”

I will show it you when I strike you at the Murray Hill Thursday.

Mrs. Clemens says you & I must be at the Author’s Club without fail, Thursday night; & not to prosecute this case, but to stop other people from prosecuting it. [¶] Well, women can’t reason, but they have been provided with an instinct which comes within an ace of being as valuable as intelligence [MTP].

Note: A defense of James Russell Lowell, recent US minister to England, was at hand here. Julian Hawthorne had interviewed Lowell, who made “injudicious” remarks about English royalty and nobility. The Club was considering expelling Hawthorne, but did not take that action (see MTNJ 3: 266-7n132).

Sam’s notebook also added an opinion about the New York World/Hawthorne-Lowell flap:

He should have distinctly told him that what he said would be printed….The question for the Committee [Author’s Club] is mere that one: Did he plainly tell Lowell that what he said would be printed? Or did he merely intimate it in some darkling way, hoping it would not be understood.

William Mackay Laffan wrote from N.Y. responding to Sam’s request to visit, and answering a question Sam must have put to him about two gentlemen:

There is yet another solution: Both were Drunk and incapable! I cannot be there until late, very late on Thursday night by reason of having to dine with one of the Harpers at the Union League Club.

Will you dine with me on Friday? There will be a chap from London who is a past grand master of the art of Baleuistry[?]. He’s decidedly interesting [MTP]. On the envelope Sam wrote “Dine? / Hunt up the / tow bill.”