April 13 Wednesday – Sam and Livy went to New York, where they attended the 100th performance of Taming of the Shrew, starring John Drew and Ada Rehan (1860-1916), at Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. William Tecumseh Sherman served as toastmaster for a midnight dinner on stage, and introduced Sam who gave a supper speech, a recollection of his difficulty a few years before in getting into the theater and past a door guard to see Augustin Daly. The talk is published in Fatout’s Mark Twain Speaking, p.222-4. From Fatout’s introduction:

  To celebrate the first successful American run of a Shakespearean comedy, Augustin Daly gave a midnight supper on the state for the two stars of the cast….A gay company assembled around a huge circular table, twenty-eight feet in diameter: H.H. Furness, Rose Eytinge, General Horace Porter, Elihu Vedder, Bronson Howard, May Irwin, Wilson Barrett, Otis Skinner, Lester Wallack, Laurence Hutton, William Winter, and others. General Sherman, toastmaster, introduced Mark Twain as the chief humorist and philosopher of his time. See Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly: 431-35; also The Shrew’s Centenary, A Reminiscence of the 13th of April by One of the Invited (New York, 1887).

Note: also see John Drew’s My Years on the Stage p.75 (1921).

Samuel Erasmus Moffett married Mary Emily Mantz in California. They would have two children, Anita Moffett (1891-1952) and Francis Clemens Moffett (1895-1927), Sam’s grandnephew and grandniece [MTL 1: 383].

J.F. Cornish, publisher wrote to Sam. He was a “master at Christs Hospital, London” and collected “queer answers.” He noticed that the Century article, “English As She Is Taught” was strikingly “similar” and in one or two cases identical to his article which had appeared in Cornhill, “Boys Blunders” for June, 1886. Sam would forward the letter to Caroline B. Le Row, who had furnished much of Sam’s material:

Please return this to me — & with it a letter to me which I can send to him, answering his question. You can leave off your name, (or you can sign it & I will ask him to keep secret, whichever you please. Please say you would like to see both of his articles.

Sam added,

Think of corresponding with a Master of the Blue-Coat School! It sweeps a body back to Edward VI’s time [MTP].

The London Pall Mall Gazette, p.14 ran the full text of “English As She Is Taught.”