Sam wrote two letters from Toledo, Ohio to Livy. After remarking on the “prettiest furniture” of the hotel the night before in Jackson, Mich., Sam told of his day: “We got up at 5 & took the train. All the way, in the cars, was a mother with her first child—the proudest & silliest fool I have struck this year. She beat the new brides that one sees on the trains” [MTP].

As GW Cable refused to travel on Sundays, he departed Grand Rapids at 5 am Monday, December 15 to arrive in Toledo in time for the show.

Two copies of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were deposited in the Copyright Office, Library of Congress, though the official publication did not take place until Feb. 18, 1885 [Hirst, “A Note on the Text” Oxford edition, 1996].

Sam took a train from Buffalo at 12:30 A.M . and arrived at Ann Arbor, Mich. at 10 A.M. Sam wrote from Ann Arbor to Livy:

"...went straight to bed, declining President Angel’s [Buffalo University] invitation to dinner & meet ex-President Hayes’s wife & others at 6 this evening. It will be a long time before I sample anybody’s hospitality again. I have been asleep two hours, & shall resume it right off. I find no letters here—hope for some before we get away. I love you sweetheart "[MTP].

The Dawson Brothers in Canada and Chatto & Windus in London published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [Powers, MT A Life 489; Roberts 22].

Sam and Cable arrived in Toronto, Canada at 4:30 P.M . on the Great Western train from Niagara Falls [Roberts 19]. In Toronto, Rose Publishing Co. applied to Sam to buy the Canadian rights to publish Huck Finn [Dec. 10 to Webster, MTP]. Ozias Pond was not the tour’s manager until after New Year’s day, but came with the pair. They all stated at the Rossin House, Toronto’s first luxury hotel. In the evening Sam and Cable gave a reading in Horticulture Gardens Pavilion, a 2,500 seat hall only six years old.

Sam and Cable rose at 4:30 A.M . and took the train [from Utica?] to Rochester, New York, arriving at 10 A.M . They gave a 2 PM matinee reading in Rochester at the Academy of Music for a small, but “appreciative to a degree” audience, who fought a downpour to hear the two men. The evening performance was to “a large house and great fun.” Cable wrote his wife that neither of them had ever done so well [Turner, MT & GWC 66].

Railroad:  New York Central

Sam wrote from Syracuse, New York to Thomas Nast, thanking him for the Nast family’s recent hospitality in Morristown, N.J.

“...do all your praying now, for a time is coming when you will have to go railroading & platforming, & then you will find you cannot pray any more because you will have only just time to swear enough” [MTP].

...at the opera house in Ithaca, New York, they opened to “a quiet, undemonstrative audience and presently had them clean out of themselves,” Cable chuckled. Afterward Sam went to a beer hall “and found about forty students from Cornell University” with whom he imbibed. [Page 430 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]

Sam and Cable arrived at Albany, New York at noon. Governor and President-elect Cleveland requested an audience. Writing to Livy the next day about the meeting: ...we had a quite jolly & pleasant brief chat with the President-elect. He remembered me easily, have seen me often in Buffalo, but I didn’t remember him, of course, & I didn’t say I did.