May 5 Saturday – Sam wrote a short note from Hartford to his brother Orion in Keokuk about his private secretary’s carelessness at forgetting to send “the usual checks” for Orion. Sam enclosed them. He had a “very bad cold in the head” and couldn’t send details. “…the time is needed for swearing” [MTLE 2: 64, 65].
May 4–16 Wednesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Charles E. Perkins, his attorney and financial manager, asking for an accounting of interest on his various investments totaling $31,000. Sam complained that Fanny C. Hesse’s “accounts are so intolerably mixed,” that he couldn’t figure them out [MTLE 2: 62].
May 3 Thursday – The New York Daily Graphic ran “Mark Twain and His Chairman,” by “Gath,” (George Alfred Townsend) Sam’s comments on the actor Charles Parsloe [Scharnhorst, Interviews 13-14].
Address and location unknown
May 2 Wednesday – Based on his May 1 note to Howells, Sam arrived back in Hartford. Donald Hoffman, however, puts May 1 as the day Sam arrived home, with a cold and bronchitis [25].
Orion Clemens wrote from Keokuk, Ia.
My Dear Brother:— / I enclose a picture of the leech that draws the blood that Col. Sellers makes.
May 1 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Baltimore to Howells.
April 27 Friday – Sam had just received another letter from Livy and responded again from Baltimore.
“Livy My Darling, I had a jolly adventure last night with a chap from the ‘Eastern Shore’—you must remind me to tell you about it when I get home. I spent 4 hours in the State Prison to-day, after rehearsal, but it would take a book to hold all I saw & heard” [MTLE 2: 58].
April 26 Thursday – Sam wrote a very long and extraordinary letter (32 pages MS.) from Guy’s Hotel in Baltimore to Livy, describing his visit to the automated and palatial estate (“Alexandroffsky”) of Thomas DeKay Winans (1820-1878), an important and wealthy railroad pioneer who had made his money building a railroad with his brother William, and Major George Washington Whistler for Czar Nich
April 25? Wednesday – This is the date Sam wrote in his Apr. 17 letter to Mary Fairbanks that he would be in Washington to oversee rehearsals for Ah Sin. He had hoped to take Livy and “remain in Washington & Baltimore till the middle of May…” but Sam went alone [MTLE 2: 41].
April 24 Tuesday – Sam left New York and arrived in Baltimore [MTLE 2: 47].