May, early – Joe Goodman, then living in San Francisco, attended a play, an adaptation of The Gilded Age, by Gilbert B. Densmore (sometimes misidentified as G.S. Densmore). Joe sent Sam a clipping on the production [Walker, Phillip 185].
April 30 Thursday – Charles Dudley Warner wrote to Sam. In part:
April 27 Monday – Sam wrote from Quarry Farm, Elmira to Dr. John Brown that the family was well, and they were in Elmira to spend the summer, though a snowstorm hit day before. Elmira grew hot in the summer, Sam wrote, so they moved to “the top of a hill 6 or 700 feet high, about 2 or 3 miles from here—it never gets hot up there” [MTL 6: 121].
Orion Clemens wrote again to Sam.
April 25 Saturday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Edgar “Ned” Wakeman. Sam repeated that he could not take on Wakeman’s book and would not put his name to a book that someone else had written, but he did refer Wakeman to Elisha Bliss, warning that Eastern publishers rarely took on a book from an unknown man, and when they did the royalties were low [MTL 6: 119].
Mollie Clemens wrote:
Dear Sam
April 24 Friday – Sam wrote from Elmira to the editor of the Dubuque (Iowa) Herald about an imposter posing as “Charles Clemmens, agent for Mark Twain,” and a brother who had been selling tickets to non-existent lectures by Mark Twain.
“I hope that the full rigor of the law will be meted out to this small villain. He professes to be my brother. If he is, it is a pity he does not know how to spell the family name” [MTL 6: 116].
April 23 Thursday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Orion. Letters flew back and forth (many lost) about Orion and Mollie buying a farm in Keokuk, Mollie’s hometown. For Orion it would be “a sort of gloomy exile,” but he knew “Mollie would be happy there” [MTL 6: 110].
April 18 Saturday – Sam replied from Elmira to David Gray of the Buffalo Courier. Sam extended an invitation for the Grays to visit them at Quarry Farm in a few weeks. Sam mentioned the “Mark Twain dinner” joke, and that he’d “swallowed the joke without any difficulty” [MTL 6: 108].
April 17 Friday – Sam and Livy continued on to Mrs. Langdon’s in Elmira, where they stayed until May 5 and then moved to Quarry Farm with Susan and Theodore Crane [MTL 6: 47n1].
From pages 120-23 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:
Under the best of circumstances, Sam preferred to summer at Quarry Farm than to simmer in Hartford. With Livy in the final trimester of her pregnancy and with her history of miscarriages and premature births, the Clemenses hurried there from an excess of caution early in the spring of 1874....
April 15 Wednesday – Sam and Livy left Hartford for Elmira, stopping in New York where they stayed two nights at the new Windsor Hotel. There they met Mary Mason Fairbanks and her son Charley [MTL 6: 109n2].
An inch of rain fell on New York City [NOAA.gov].