November 11 Tuesday – Sam wrote two letters from the Palmer House in Chicago to Livy. The first letter recounted activities of the prior day (Nov. 10). The second letter told of meeting…
“…an elderly German gentleman named Raster, who said his wife owed her life to me—hurt in the Chicago fire & lay menaced with death a long time, but the Innocents Abroad kept her mind in a cheerful attitude.”
November 10 Monday – Sam and George Warner arrived in Chicago and took rooms at the Palmer House [MTLE 4: 129]. The pair:
November 9 Sunday – Sam wrote en route (“In a hotel-car, 300 miles west of Philadelphia, 11.30 Sunday morning”) from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, to Livy. He would telegraph her from Pittsburgh, he wrote. He liked the sleeping car and his breakfast, and hoped she had slept well, but was afraid she didn’t. “You must have Emily Perkins or some other quiet body with you.” George wrote on the note: “He is a jolly travelling companion” [MTLE 4: 134].
November 8 Saturday – Sam left Hartford with George Warner, both bound for Chicago [MTLE 4: 130]. He stopped in New York, where Dan Slote told him that the scrapbook business was “booming—can’t fill the orders” [134].
November 7 Friday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Thomas Bailey Aldrich. After some playful prose and jabbing at Aldrich, Sam wrote of the impending trip to Chicago:
November 6 Thursday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Hjalmar Boyesen of Ithaca, New York. Boyesen and family had been in Paris at the same time as the Clemens family. Sam listed the letters he had written Boyesen after being informed by a “fine young fellow” named Bacon that he hadn’t answered Boyesen’s letters. Sam wrote that their “unpacking room looks like a furniture hospital” [MTLE 4: 127].
November 5 Wednesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to U.D. at the W.K. Carson Co., Baltimore, Maryland. U.D. had evidently asked for a biographical sketch. Sam referred him to the listing in Men of the Time, by Routledge, or Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors [MTLE 4: 125].
November 4 Tuesday – Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote from Ponkapog to Sam.
November 1 Saturday – Sam wrote a check drawn on George P. Bissell & Co, Bankers, Hartford, to Patrick McAleer, the family coachman, for $52.45 [MTP].
November – Sam sent a correspondence card to an unidentified person with this maxim, altering “the great & good Franklin”:
“Never put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day after tomorrow just as well” [MTLE 4: 123].
November to December 15, 1879 – Clemens wrote to unidentified. Cue: “I consider it slander…”; not found at MTP though catalogued as UCCL 13217.