June 17 Sunday – William Walter Phelps, the ex-Minister to Germany and close friend of the Clemens family, died in Teaneck, N.J. only one year after returning to the US to take a judgeship. His funeral procession was lined with hundreds of people; the trees he had planted himself lined the path. At the time of his death, Phelps owned half of what is presently Teaneck.

In Paris, Sam wrote a short note to Chatto & Windus asking them to send their annual cheque payable to Livy, in care of Drexel Harjes & Co., Bankers, Paris [MTP].

The Washington Post, p.14 ran a long feature article by Edward Marshall on Mark Twain, “American’s Funny Man,” which included engravings of Mark Twain in 1862 and a current profile, along with a page of Mark Twain’s manuscript. The subtitles of the article are: “An Attempt at an Interview with Mark Twain,” and “His Advice to Humorists,” and “There Are Only Thirty-five Jokes in Existence,” etc. In part: 

He Believes in the Anecdote.

He considers the anecdote about as high a kind of humor as exists. The students of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania made him an honorary member of the class of ’94. In accepting it he said that he really did not deserve the honor as his education had neglected him, but that now it had been thrust upon him his ambition had been fired and he wanted to be not only a member of a Bryn Mawr class, but a member of the Bryn Mawr faculty. “I should like to be,” said he “a professor of anecdote. It’s a very useful art. I’ll give you a lesson. One kind of anecdote contains only words. You talk till you’re tired and then ring in a laugh — if you’re lucky. I’ll illustrate this plan by an anecdote of a Scotch-Irish christening. In this Scotch-Irish village a baby had been born and a large number of friends had collected to see it christened. The minister, thinking this a good opportunity to display his oratorical powers, took the baby in his hands, saying:

“ ‘He is a little fellow, yes, a little fellow, and as I look into your faces I see an expression of scorn that suggests that you despise him. But if you had the soul of a poet and the gift of prophecy you would not despise him. You would look far into the future and see what it might be. Consider how small the acorn is from which grows the mighty oak. So this little child may be a great poet and write tragedies or a great statesman or perhaps a future warrior wading in blood up to his neck; he may be — er — what is his name?’

“His name?” asked the mother, who had been carried away by the preacher’s eloquence. ‘Oh, Mary Ann, sir.’” [Note: Reprinted in American Literary Realism, Vol. 40, No. 3, Spring 2008, p 273-7]