March 19 Friday – Susy Clemens’ eighth birthday.
Sam’s Mar. 19 letter to Texas schoolboy, David Watt Bowser, includes the sentence, “I wrote all day yesterday…on the fifteenth chapter of a story for boys entitled ‘The Little Prince & the Little Pauper,’ —laid in the time of Edward VI of England…” [MTP].
March 18 Thursday – Emma J. Stafford wrote to Sam asking for a letter for their church “Evening with Mark Twain” as they’d done with several other famous men [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “No. A heavy curse fall on the particular devil who invented this most offensive form of persecution. / SLC”
March 16 Tuesday – In Hartford, Sam wrote a long inscription to Twichell in a copy of A Tramp Abroad, marking various pages where things happened, pointing out how imagination had “preposterously expanded” some things.
“We had a mighty good time, Joe, & the 6 weeks I would dearly like to repeat, any time—but the rest of the 14 months, never. With love, Yours, Mark” [MTLE 5: 45].
March 15 Monday – Sam wrote to Christian Tauchnitz in Leipzig, Germany; the letter not extant but mentioned in Tauchnitz’s May 3 reply.
March 14 Sunday – Sam wrote from Hartford to an unidentified person about responses to distressed nation appeals.
“…it is only when she [a nation] asks for bread, that creed & party are forgotten & the whole world rises to respond” [MTLE 5: 43].
March 13 Saturday – Two copies of A Tramp Abroad were placed with the Copyright Office, Library of Congress [Hirst, “A Note on the Text” Oxford edition, 1996].
March 11 Thursday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Howells, sharing the plot of Prince and the Pauper, and noting:
March 10 Wednesday – Sam and Livy went to the theater to see William Dean Howells’ play, Yorick’s Love, by a leading Spanish author, Estebanez, with Lawrence Barrett. Sam loved it and wrote: “The language beautiful, the passion so fine, the plot so ingenious, the whole thing so stirring, so charming, so pathetic.” It was “the language of the Prince & the Pauper,” he wrote Howells on Mar.
March 9 Tuesday – C.E. Goodspeed wrote from Newton Centre, Mass. to ask for an autograph [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Auto fiend / 1880 / Cheek”
Sam wrote to W.A. May in Scranton Pa. Letter not extant but referred to in May’s Mar. 11 reply.
March 8 Monday – Sam inscribed this date and his signature in a copy of Sketches, New and Old to an unidentified person [MTLE 5: 35].