March 29 Sunday – The Clemens family was en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for Colombo, Ceylon. During the Mar. 28 to 31 voyage Sam wrote a short essay burlesquing missionaries in a parody of Sir John Lubbock’s Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Hapbits of the Social Hymenoptera (1882). Gribben writes,

Clemens claims that in Jeypore he painted forty five ants different hues and loosed them among “four miniature houses of worship — a Mohammedan mosque, a Hindu temple, a Jewish synagogue & a Xn cathedral.” To his professed disappointment the ants always preferred whatever type of church in which he had placed a cube of sugar; he facetiously deduces that this behavior demonstrates how the ant is “the opposite of man” in religious matters. In one canceled passage Clemens wonders why Lubbock respected the ant so highly, since Lubbock’s experiments seem to show that man overestimates the ant’s intelligence (TS pp. 11-13). Mark Twain’s decision not to include this amusing spoof in FE (1897) was unfortunate, but as he wrote to Richard Watson Gilder (who wanted the essay for Century Magazine) on 13 January 1897, he feared that a digression on ants might unduly interrupt the travel-narrative structure of FE, and he removed this passage from the manuscript” [427-8].