May 5 Friday – Sam was quite fascinated by an ice factory he visited and described it the next day in a letter to Livy. “They make 60 tons a day in summer & 100 in winter, & sell it at a cent a pound.”
In the evening Sam received a letter from Susy and Clara and Livy [May 6 letter to Livy, MTP].
May 4 Thursday – Sam wrote that he and Bixby “joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug” [Ch 48 LM].
From Sam’s notebook:
May 3 Wednesday – Sam “lay abed till toward noon…& made Osgood go out & meet the appointments.” After Osgood returned they began a game of billiards, but Horace Bixby came by. Sam went and dined with his old mentor [May 4 to Livy, MTP]. In Ch. 48 of Life on the Mississippi, Sam wrote he encountered Bixby on the street and the two men embraced, but the May 4 account is probably the correct one.
May 2 Tuesday – Dr. John Brown of Scotland, favored friend of the Clemens family died. Sam would learn of the death before he left New Orleans, in a “damp newspaper.”
Sam wrote from New Orleans to Livy:
May 1 Monday – Sam, Cable and Harris spent the afternoon “at Cable’s red-and-olive cottage, surrounded by orange trees and a garden, on Eighth Street, on the lip of the Garden District” [Kaplan 245]. The crowd of children who’d come to Cable’s house to see their beloved Uncle Remus were shocked to find the red-haired man was white and too shy to read to an audience.
Chapter 29 of Life on the Mississippi:
WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight—made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana, out into the country and ended its career as a river town. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees—a growth which will magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the exiled town.
WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless water—also a big island—in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.
May – Sam’s notebook carries an entry to “see Dickens for a note on Cairo [Illinois]” [Gribben 187]. In LM Sam focused on the improvements in Cairo, no longer the place Dickens had described, a:
“…hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise.”
April 30 Sunday – 7 AM at the train depot, Sam met Joel Chandler Harris, who’d traveled from Atlanta. Harris registered at the St. Charles Hotel, where Sam was staying; the two then met George Cable and attended church services of the Prytania Street Presbyterian Church, Rev. J.H.