November 2 Tuesday –In Vienna Sam also wrote to Bettina Wirth.

Mrs. Clemens corrects me. She says “My Grandfather’s Old Ram” is in print. She says it is in a book of mine whose American title is “Roughing It”—but the English & Tauchnitz editions bear another name—a name which we are not acquainted with. She thinks that the “Negro Ghost Story” is also in one of my books, but she doesn’t know the name of that book, & neither do I. The truth is, I am not very well acquainted with my books.

The “Gold und Silberland” book which we gave to your little boy is made up of parts of “Roughing It,” but they left the Old Ram out.

Thank you in advance, & very much, for the Reichsrath ticket.

I am sorry, for your sake, that I know so little about my literature. / Sincerely … [MTP]. Note: IM Gold-Und Silberland was the translation of part of RI; see May 25, 1899 for an inscription of this work by Clemens. The strikeout phrase may be Sam remembering the gift was to another boy.

Joe Twichell wrote to Sam. Twichell had:

…been reading and re-reading, and again reading your ‘In Memoriam” for Susy, with the accompaniment of a gray autumn day and the falling leaves to blend with its unspeakable heart-breaking sadness; its aching, choking pathos….It renews the pain of the sense of Life’s inscrutable mystery, and of the mystery of human experience. It renews also (may I say?) the deep and solemn gladness of the faith that God in whose awful hand we all are held, is, when you get to the end of things, Love.

Joe pasted a clipping in his letter, commenting “There are so many things about you in the papers now-a-days pleasant to red: some of them commercial, I suppose, but not all. I Think the book is going to have an immense success. Would it might bring you home!” The clipping:

Mr. Clemens will be a proud man when he learns that at the dinner to Mr. Anthony Hope at the Lotos Club, the other night, Dr. Chauncey Depew named Quo Vadis and Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc as the two great novels of the year [MTP]. ,