En route from Montreal to New York City Sam wrote to Livy. He’d sent a toboggan for the children but cautioned, “They better not try to use it till I come.” He wrote just as the train left the Lake Champlain area.
They were welcomed upon their arrival in Montreal on February 18 with a reception hosted by the Athenaeum Club at the Windsor Hotel that lasted until 6:00 p.m. and, Cable reported, “was the most elaborate affair I have ever had part it. I don't think I could have shaken less than two hundred and fifty hands.” He and Sam read that evening and the next before capacity audiences at the Queen’s Hall, and the Gazette reviewed their performance the first night, noting that “only one Mark Twain in the world...
We had an immense snowstorm yesterday—snow the entire day & all night. We were 111⁄2 hours making a 7-hour trip.
To-day we are likely to be all day going 3 hours. We’ve got 3 cars & 3 engines. Alongside us, out here in the snowy plains is a Pacific RR train standing still, whose engines cannot budge it a peg.
“He [Twain] informed Livy on the seventeenth that his companion was the 'pitifulest human louse' he had ever known” (pg 62 Cardwell)
After another Sunday layover, they “came within an ace of missing’ their engagement in Brockville, Canada, spending “11½ hours making a 7-hour trip" there for an appearance Monday evening. [From page 448 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]
Sam was introduced to tobogganing by 74 young ladies from Helmuth Female College, “2 1⁄2 miles” out from town. It was twelve below zero. You sit in the midst of a row of girls on a long broad board with its front curled up, & away you go, like lightning....the sport was so prodigiously exciting & entertaining that it was well for us it was cut short by telephonic message that the train was being held for us; otherwise we should have tired ourselves to death...Tobagganing is very violent fun...[Feb.
At 9 A.M . Sam wrote from Detroit, Michigan to Livy, whose last letter transmitted a hint by some Hartford charity for Cable to perform for their benefit.
Sam and Cable spent all day on February 12 traveling 140 miles to Detroit on account of the inclement weather, Cable walked onstage at Whitney s Opera House twenty minutes past the hour and, he reported to Louise, even then he “was inconvenienced by the tardy incoming of a special train from another town that brought about a hundred auditors. Strange to say I went to the work fresh & bright & from the very start did, by verdict of all, the finest evening's reading thus far in my experience.’ Sam received the more favorable notices for his performance this evening, however.
“The audience was cool, and the Weekly News charged that Twain had humbugged and swindled the people of Oberlin” (pg 58 Cardwell)
“Fourteen years later, when Twain published “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” citizens of Oberlin thought that their town was the prototype for Hadleyburg and that the writer was taking belated revenge for a bad press.” (pg 58 Cardwell)
See Touring with Cable and Huck for review.
Sam wrote from Columbus, Ohio to Livy (continued from above): ....After the show (& a hot supper, Pond & I did play billiards until 2 a.m., & then I scoured myself in the bath, & read & smoked till 3, then slept till half past 9, had my breakfast in bed, & now have just finished that meal & am feeling fine as a bird [MTP]. Sam also complained again about Cable keeping “his program strung out to one hour, in spite of all” he could do. Sam was especially sick of Cable’s piece, “Mary’s Night Ride,” a sentimental episode at the end of Cable’s novel, Dr.
In Indianapolis, Sam wrote Livy a letter full of indignation and disgust with George W. Cable. He told of Cable interrupting an anecdote at a Saturday evening reception to tell him he was leaving (due to the Sabbath). Sam accused Cable of “insulting & insolent ways with servants” and relayed Pond’s opinion that the “servants of the Everett House all hate him,” and that he would starve himself if on his own expenses, but his “appetite is insatiable” if “somebody else is paying....” Sam said Cable wouldn’t even cross a bridge on a Sunday, though he’d wanted to hear Beecher.