November 18 Thursday – Sam attended a world premiere of the operetta Blumen Mary (Mary’s Flower Shop) at the Theater an der Wien. He was spotted by a Neue Freie Presse reviewer and his presence was reported the next day on p.6. The operetta was set in New York, with music by Charles Weinberger and book and lyrics by Leo Stein and Alexander Landesburg. Dolmetsch writes:
November 17 Wednesday – At the Metropole Hotel, Vienna, Austria, Sam and Livy wrote to H.H. Rogers, including a paragraph from Livy with formal request of the three $10,000 payments to be made to the Webster creditors as outlined in Sam’s Nov. 11.
November 15 Monday – At the Metropole Hotel, Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to an unidentified clergyman, who had evidently written with examples of what Sam called “mental telegraphy,”; and also questioned the forgotten use of a detail, a mole, in TS,D. The clergyman also mentioned James Payn (1830-1898; English novelist, from 1883 editor of the Cornhill Magazine), and offered cases where suggestion had been made by “unsentient things.” Sam replied:
November 13 Saturday – Two copies of FE were deposited with the US Copyright Office [Hirst, “A Note on the Text” Afterword materials p.29, Oxford ed. 1996]. The English version, More Tramps Abroad,, varied slightly and had an official publication date of Nov. 25, 1897.
November 11 Thursday – In Vienna, Austria Sam finished his Nov. 10 to H.H. Rogers. After thinking about the plan to pay off $30,000 to the creditors for 24 hours, he was convinced it was “sound & rational,” and he wished he’d thought of it “twenty days ago” for it had been “raining & snowing & storming politics here” and he felt he should have been writing about it. He had just received a letter and evidently a photo of Rogers (not extant), and he complimented him on his youthful looks at 58.
November 10 Wednesday – At the Metropole Hotel, Vienna, Austria, Sam began a letter to H.H. Rogers that he finished Nov. 11
November 9 Tuesday – This is the day that Sam had invited Francis H. Skrine to dinner at their Metropole hotel apartment [Nov. 3 to Skrine].
November 8 Monday – Eleanor V. Hutton (Mrs. Laurence Hutton) wrote to Sam, enclosing a five-page typed discussion of Helen Keller from Dr. Louis Waldstein’s book The Sub-Conscious Self. They were touched by Sam’s poem in Harpers to Susy, “In Memoriam” [MTP].
Joe Twichell wrote to Sam having rec’d his of Oct. 23 , to his “extreme comfort and delectation.” He asked that the distance between them not lead to dropping their friendship.
November 7 Sunday – At the Metropole Hotel, Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to William Blackwood.
Livy wrote the note and Sam signed it.
“I want to thank you most heartily for your note of the introduction [not extant] to Mme Laszowska: we have all enjoyed very much meeting her and hope that we may see a good deal of her during our sojourn in Vienna” [MTP].
November 6 Saturday – The N.Y. Times ran “Mark Twain Still in Debt,” p.4 which included the cable Sam had sent to Bliss on Nov. 4. (The Hartford Courant ran essentially the same article on p. 12)