November 7, 1876 Tuesday 

November 7 Tuesday – The day Clemens recalled Bret Harte “suddenly” appearing at his house “and remaining there during the following day” [AMT 2: 424]. However, Twichell’s journal shows Sam did not correctly recall the date, since Twichell and Harte visited the Clemenses on Sunday, Nov. 5 (see entry). Clemens also recalled the claim of Harte, that he did not wish to vote on election day as he’d obtain the promise of a consulship from both candidates, Samuel J.

November 5, 1876 Sunday

November 5 Sunday – Bret Harte attended services at Twichell’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church. From Twichell’s journal:

“After evening service went over with H. to M.T.’s and had a very pleasant hour with Bret Harte” [Yale 114].

November 1, 1876 Wednesday

November 1 Wednesday  Sam wrote from Hartford to Jacob H. Burrough, Sam’s St. Louis roommate at the Pavey’s in 1854, who had written about Will Bowen being remarried. Burrough had recently traveled through New York, and his letter to Sam recalled a young Sam Clemens. Sam responded:

October 28, 1876 Saturday 

October 28 Saturday  Sam wrote from Hartford to Ellen D. Conway, Moncure’s wife, apologizing for thinking he had answered her letter of two months before, but discovering that he had not. Ellen’s letter concerned the electrotypes, cost and disposition of which Sam had offered to absorb.

October 27, 1876 Friday

October 27 Friday  Sam dictated a letter from Hartford to John T. Raymond, who was in Toronto, Canada and who evidently had made objections to terms in their agreement to continue in his role of Col. Sellers in the play Gilded Age, which was eventually called Colonel Sellers. Sam wrote that he had supposed they might meet but he was going to Europe “for a year or two” with his family in April.

October 26, 1876 Thursday

October 26 Thursday – Sam wrote to William Cullen Bryant. This is another letter soliciting feedback on one George Vaughan, a Virginia writer who authored Progressive Religious and Social Poems (see Oct. 25, 1875 to the editor of the Hartford Courant). Vaughan professed to be engaged in establishing a normal school for colored people in Virginia and that many prominent people, Bryant among them, had contributed to his fund.

October 25, 1876 Wednesday

October 25 Wednesday  Sam answered a letter from an unidentified woman (perhaps Miss Wood) who had been in Memphis to help the injured and dying from the Pennsylvania boiler explosion that killed Sam’s brother Henry. Sam could not recall the person and answered that he didn’t like to think about that week in Memphis for the horror of it.

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