December 30 Thursday – On this day or Dec. 31 Sam’s notebook reveals a performance by Leschtizky:

At Madame von Dutschka’s. Choice people there. Leschetizky played. A marvelous performance. He never plays except in that house (she says). He sacrificed himself for his first wife—believed she wd be the greatest pianist of all time—& now they have been many years separated. If he developed himself instead of her, he would have been the world’s wonder himself.

Baron von Berger lectured upon me yesterday [NB 42 TS 51-2].

Life magazine included an anonymous review of FE, p. 578:

“Mark Twain has been so much exploited as a ‘humorist’ that people are apt not to realize that he is remarkable as a writer of great acuteness in observation and felicity of phrase in description. There is real poetry feeling in many of his pictures of landscape.” FE “is a strange conglomerate of philosophical reflection, travel notes, stories picked up by the way, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON’s maxims, and elaborate and more or less tenuous satire. Anyone who has acquired the art of judicious skipping can get a great deal of fun out of the book. It is worth considerable trouble to get at his account of Bombay; or to ponder over his views of what ‘civilization’ has done for the black man of Australia.” MT follows no conventional formulas: “Order, proportion, sequence and coherence have no conceivable part in his scheme of literary composition. He follows his own sweet will, like a spoiled child who knows he can have his own way if he is only audacious and amusing” [Tenney: “A Reference Guide Sixth Annual Supplement,” American Literary Realism, Spring 1982 p. 8].