January 17 Saturday – Sam and Cable gave two more performances at the Central Music Hall in Chicago.  Before the matinee performance, Sam wrote Livy:

January 16 Friday – Sam wrote from Chicago to Susy Clemens, thanking her for a letter and asking her to write “two or three times a week in Mamma’s place…What I’m after is to save her” [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Orion, thanking him for a “perfect 24 hours there, with the sort of social activity which produces rest instead of fatigue” [MTP].

January 15 Thursday – Cable rose at four in the morning to catch a train, reaching Burlington, Iowa at a quarter to seven. Sam stayed behind in Keokuk to spend more time with his mother, Jane Clemens [Turner, MT & GWC 88]. The Keokuk Gate City ran an article discussing Sam’s lectures and his greetings to his mother [Tenney 14].

January 14 Wednesday – Delayed by a snowstorm, and “Long past midnight,” Sam wrote from Keokuk, Iowa to Livy. He’d had “no time to turn around, for 2 or 3 days” and so was behind in his letters. He wrote poignantly of his mother and of Hannibal, and an old friend since childhood, Tom Nash. Nash had been deaf and dumb for 40 years and handed Sam a letter which he read and sent to Livy to keep.

January 13 Tuesday – Sam telegraphed from Quincy, Illinois to Charles Webster about the chapter to be given to Thorndike Rice of the North American Review. Sam had given orders to Rice that if Webster had not been heard from within a day then Bromfield could leave him a chapter of Huck Finn.

January 12 Monday – After another early rise to catch a 9:40 train, according to Ozias Pond’s diary, Sam was in a foul mood and attacked (and won) a battle with a window shutter at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis [Cardwell 41-2]. The troupe arrived in Quincy, Illinois in the afternoon.

January 11 Sunday – Since Sam had decided back in 1866 or 1867 to put his Sandwich Islands Letters into a book, he understood the value of pre-selling books by running excerpts in popular newspapers or magazines. On this date the Chicago Times and the New York Tribune ran portions of Huck Finn [The Twainian, Mar. 1944 p4].

Sam wrote two letters from St. Louis to Livy. The expressed,

January 10 Saturday – In the evening, Sam and Cable gave a second performance in Mercantile Library Hall , St. Louis. The Post Dispatch, and the Daily Globe-Democrat gave the pair positive reviews [Railton]. Cardwell says the crowd was not good, and according to Ozias Pond, Saturday night was “not popular in St. Louis ‘with the better element’.” [Cardwell 37].