April 8 Saturday – Sam received a letter from Moncure Conway, which asked if Sam preferred to invest funds and take a percentage of the profits from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or go with a normal royalty payment. Clemens answered with a telegram and followed with a letter the next day [MTLE 1: 40].
April 7 Friday – Sam’s second letter to the Courant editor:
April 6 Thursday – Annie A. Fields (Mrs. James T. Fields; 1834-1915) wrote in her diary of a visit by her and her husband to Hartford and of Sam:
April 5 Wednesday – Sam wrote to the editor of the Hartford Courant about heavy rains and a bad road, which had “disappeared.” The letter ran the next day.
April 4 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to an unidentified person, answering that he did not know Charles Webb’s date of birth [MTLE 1: 39].
April 3 Monday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Howells about his proposed Atlantic review of Tom Sawyer:
“It is a splendid notice, & will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, & will modify or shut up the unfriendly. To ‘fear God & dread the Sunday school’ exactly describes that old feeling which I use to have but I couldn’t have formulated it.”
April 2 Sunday – In Cambridge, Mass., Howells wrote a short note to Sam, sending a song (now unidentified) from Francis Boott (1813-1904), written “in a key suitable for your voice” [MTHL 1: 128]. Note: Boott composed at times under the pseudonym “Telford.”
April – Matthew Freke Turner wrote “Artemus Ward and the Humourists of America,” for New Quarterly Magazine. Turner didn’t care much for Sam, thought he and Harte deserved public criticism; that Sam’s was a “low humor, ridiculing sacred things, forced, long-winded, tedious in his parodies,” [Tenney 7].
March 31 Friday – In the afternoon, Sam gave the “Roughing It” lecture at Chickering Hall in New York, to raise money for Dr. John Brown of Scotland [MTPO notes with Mar. 16 to Redpath; New York Times Mar. 26, p7 “Amusements – Brief Mention”].
NYC temperatures ranged from 46-33 degrees F. with no rain [NOAA.gov].
March 30 Thursday – Sam gave a lecture titled, “Roughing It in the Land of the Big Bonanza” at the Academy of Music, in Brooklyn, New York [Brooklyn Eagle, Mar. 31, 1876, p3]. The newspaper stated the lecture was at 1:30 PM and the audience was small. Agent Redpath came out before Twain appeared and asked the audience to move closer to the better seats in the parquette.