October 24 Friday – After a seventeen month absence, the Clemens family returned home to Hartford and their Farmington Avenue house [MTLE 4: 111, 115]. From Twichell’s journal:
“Dear Mark Twain and his family are home again. We called on them in the evening. It seems only yesterday that we parted in Switzerland” [Yale, copy at MTP].
October 23 Thursday – G.E. Hutchingson, Newspaper Advertising Agent wrote Sam a note of recommendation for Jesse M. Leathers [MTP].
October 21 Tuesday – The Clemens family left Elmira and Quarry Farm and went to New York, staying a day or two before leaving for Hartford [MTLE 4: 111]. Note: Susan Crane in a 1911 letter to Paine gave the date the Clemens family left Quarry Farm as Oct.
October 17 Friday – Sam’s article “Our Georgia Visitors” ran in the Hartford Courant [Camfield, bibliog.].
C. Jensen, custom officer wrote from Stubbekøbing, Denmark to ask for an autograph [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Preserve this remarkable letter”; though English is clearly not the writer’s first language, nothing explains Twain’s envelope comment.
October 16 Thursday – Sam was drafted as a speaker for a Republican Meeting in Elmira to introduce General Joseph R.
October 15 Wednesday – C.H. Brainard wrote from Boston to Sam, enclosing a photo of a bust of Whittier by Preston Powers, Florence, Italy. Brainard solicited Sam for a contribution to place the bust (cost $900) in the Boston Public Library [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Whittier photo”.
October 14 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Pierre D. Peltier, declining an invite to dine with the Gate City Guard of Atlanta, Georgia, invited by the Putnam Phalanx, a Hartford military company.
October 13 Monday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Frederick Schweppe, an Elmira decorator, a draft for $250 [MTLE 4: 113]. Livy had engaged Schweppe to redo the walls and ceilings in the Hartford, Farmington Avenue house [Willis 129].
October 10 Friday – Susan Crane gave this as the date the Clemens family left Quarry Farm. If so, they must have stayed with the Langdons in Elmira until Oct. 21 [Susan Crane to Paine, June 14, 1911, The Twainian, Nov.-Dec.1956 p.4].
October 9 Thursday – Sam had received Howells’ letter of Sept. 17, which called writing about Orion by “an alien hand” as heartless. Howells planned on traveling “northward and westward…either the first of October or the first of November” [MTHL 1: 270]. Sam responded that he’d intended to mark the religious squib “Private,” but forgot to. He then wrote a litany of Orion’s schemes and intentions he’d received in the past month.