September 3 Saturday – In Deal Beach, N.J. Sam wrote to Louise Brownell Saunders (Mrs. A.P. Saunders) in Clinton, N.Y. (Susy’s old paramour, now married):

Dear Mrs. Saunders: / I am grateful to have those hallowed names thus consecrated, & in reverence I bow my white head before them in their new place. How long they stood for the grace & beauty & joy of life—& now, how they stand for measureless pain & loss! We are come upon evil days: may they be few! / Affectionately [MTP].

Note: This letter postmarked from Deal Beach, N.J., Sept. 3, 6 p.m. No further information was found about a day trip down the shore, but his publisher, George B. Harvey owned a summer house there. Budd [Collected 2: 993] and F. Kaplan note that Henry James was also a guest at Harvey’s shore retreat. Sam’s arrival date not known, but it was likely a weekend visit.

F. Kaplan writes:

Under a late-summer sun, Mark Twain chatted with Henry James at the New Jersey seashore home of George Harvey. The two literary titans, who had dominated post-Civil War American literature, had each recently crossed the Atlantic, James to return from his home in England for his first visit in twenty years to the city of his birth. Twain had come home that June 1904 with his wife’s body and two shattered daughters, one two thirds of the way to a nervous breakdown. He faced, in a year and a half, his seventieth birthday, and James would face his eight years later, a milestone they and their society considered not the start but close to the end of old age. Neither would add anything of major significance to what he had already accomplished, and neither thought much of the other’s work. James was alienated by Twain’s commercial success; Twain by James’s stylistic obscurity. The more James stayed away, the less he missed America; the more Twain was absent, the more he wanted to return. There was, thought, not the slightest personal animosity between them. “The weather, the air, the light etc. are delicious, and poor dear old Mark Twain,” James wrote, “beguiles the session on the deep piazza.” Twain would have called it a “porch” [612].

Harper’s Weekly published a full-page portrait of Mark Twain by Italian artist Edoardo Gelli, which was to be exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair. No further comment was given [Tenney 39].