May 26 shortly before – At the Villa Paulhof in Kaltenleutgeben Sam wrote to Joe Twichell:

Have you read “Ole Sile’s Clem? (May “Harper.”) I feel sure that it must be the best back-settlement study that was ever printed. O, the art of it! How well Coggins knows his ground, & what a sure & reserved & delicate touch he has. I knew his people, personally & intimately, every one of them, when I was a boy. I knew them in the West, you knew them in the East—they are national. How true their back-settlement wit rings; it is so good, & it is so bad—just the genuine thing, the correct border line. No bright intelligence would say those things & no dull intelligence could. They are too nearly perfect for inventions; Coggins must have heard them uttered. There are some things which the finest genius cannot counterfeit with exactness, cannot perfectly imitate, & back-settlement wit is one of these, I think. Do you remember Captain Ned Wakeman’s letter to you? The genius never lived that could counterfeit that. It seems to me that Coggin’s sketch is flawless, with one unimportant exceptional; apparently his boy utters thanks for a kindness shown him. I know the boy well. He felt his thanks, but I doubt if he allowed any detectible sign of that to appear on the outside. Watch out for Paschal H. Coggins; he is valuable and entitled to a grateful welcome [MTP].

Note: Paschal Heston Coggins (1852-1917) also wrote books for boys under the name Sidney Marlow. He was a Philadelphian by birth and a member of the Philadelphia bar. He was well known as a contributor to Youth’s Companion, Harper’s, and Atlantic

May 26 Thursday – In the morning at the Villa Paulhof in Kaltenleutgeben, Livy wrote to Dr. Thomas S. Kirkbride.

Thank you very much for the cigarettes which I found on our salon table last evening. They look very delicious it almost makes me wish that I smoked. I hope you will come very soon and see if they are as good in these surroundings as in your room [MTP]. Note: the famous psychiatrist and pioneer in the treatment of the mentally ill, by the same name, died in 1883; this may be a son studying in Vienna. See also May 27 to Kirkbride.

Sam wrote to Theodore Weld Stanton, thanking for an invitation to a Decoration Day banquet in Paris.

Dear Sir: I thank you very much for your invitation, and I would accept it if I were foot-free. For I should value the privilege of helping you do honor to the men who re-welded our broken Union & consecrated their great work with their lives; & also I should like to be there to do homage to our soldiers & sailors of to-day who are enlisted for another most righteous war, & utter the hope that they may make short & decisive work of it & leave Cuba free & fed, when they face for home again. And finally I should like to be present and see you interweave those two flags which, more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the earth—flags which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong by itself, competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand together. Truly yours, / MARK TWAIN [MTP].

Note: Flags of England and America. Sam was for the Spanish war until he read the treaty in December seeing the US was to annex the Philippines. Stanton, a correspondent for the Parisian English Daily Messenger and the N.Y. The Critic, had invited Sam to a Decoration Day banquet at the Hotel Continental in Paris. Later called Memorial Day and now celebrated on the last Monday in May, it was originally celebrated on May 30. Sam’s letter ran in The Critic and on June 20 in the NY Times, p.4, “Mark Twain on the Two Wars.”

See insert: Life 31 (May 26, 1898): 438 Part of a text and series of drawings titled, “Taking a ‘Turn’; or, The Literary Cake-Walk” [Budd, Our MT 135].