Mark reported to Livy on a poor reading in Springfield on November 7. (pg 16, Cardwell [Love Letters, p 366. The program at Springfield was experimental])
Cable reported that the performance was “against terrible odds—brass music & fire-works in front of the hall, vast crowds blocking the streets and cannon firing directly in the rear of the house”
Springfield Republican, Nov. 8, 1884 page 4.
The Twain-Cable Evening
East Orange Gazette, November 13, 1884
Mark Twain and George W. Cable
Sam was in Hartford, CT during the day but the tour began in New Haven that evening, with Livy in attendance. "The trip's my last--forever & ever"
The (New Haven) Morning Journal and Courier 1884: November 6 TWAIN AND CABLE.
Switzerland and the adjacent portions of Italy, Savoy and the Tyrol
65. From Geneva to Chamouny.
August 21 Wednesday – Sam hired a carriage and the group continued on to Interlaken, Switzerland.
From Sam’s notebook: “Left in 4-horse ambulance. Proprietor gave children box”
Rodney observes it was a “rugged journey” with “primitive roads past mountain chalets, through enticing villages, up and over the Brünig Pass, and down to Lake Brienz and Interlacken at the foot of the High Alps.” The sixty mile trip took ten hours. They took rooms at the Jungfrau Hotel.
(Day By Day)
August 15 Thursday – The entire Clemens party took a two-day excursion to the Rigi-Kulm. They spent the night in a hotel on the Rigi to watch the sunset and sunrise.
In a letter of Aug. 20, Sam described the ascent and descent to his mother:
Twichell & I took a stroll ... to the summit of Rigi, where the rheumatism captured me once more & we had to come down with the others by rail. It was a good deal like coming down a ladder by rail. I did not like it.
We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel’s tomb, hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible. I never was so glad to get home again before. I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during these last few hours. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat, such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!
In the huge Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, built fifteen hundred years ago by the inveterate St. Helena, they took us below ground, and into a grotto cut in the living rock. This was the “manger” where Christ was born. A silver star set in the floor bears a Latin inscription to that effect. It is polished with the kisses of many generations of worshiping pilgrims. The grotto was tricked out in the usual tasteless style observable in all the holy places of Palestine. As in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, envy and uncharitableness were apparent here.
We staid at this great convent all night, guests of the hospitable priests. Mars Saba, perched upon a crag, a human nest stuck high up against a perpendicular mountain wall, is a world of grand masonry that rises, terrace upon terrace away above your head, like the terraced and retreating colonnades one sees in fanciful pictures of Belshazzar’s Feast and the palaces of the ancient Pharaohs. No other human dwelling is near.