June 21 Wednesday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Samuel J. Elder.
I have read your article with great interest—& also with great profit. I am glad to have it, & I thank you.
I was at the meeting you speak of, & offered & explained the two motions I went there to make —then hurried away. But they passed. One of them was the “life & 50 years” proposition.
June 21 Thursday – Isabel Lyon’s journal:
Early the King said: “No dictating today.”
June 21 Friday – When newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported on Mark Twain venturing out on the street in his bathrobe (Paine calls it a “heavy brown bath robe,” the papers called it “sky-blue”) Clara Clemens cabled: “MUCH WORRIED. REMEMBER PROPRIETIES” [MTB 1384-5; IVL TS 75]. Sam replied by cable to Clara: “THEY ALL PATTERN AFTER ME. FATHER.” [MTP].
June 22 Thursday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: Jean and I drove over to Marlboro and then trolleyed to Keene in the rain today. It was a nice trip—moist.
Mr. Clemens read more of that satire dwelling on the currency and he made a beautiful allusion to Katherine of Aragon. Dear, foolish, gentle, loving Katherine. Today Mr. Clemens talked about the Japanese battle front being 400 miles long. Grant’s was 1200 miles and Grant was the only General ever, who didn’t hold councils of war.
June 22 Saturday – Sam attended the Royal Garden Party at Windsor, which marked the end of Ascot week. Ten special trains were scheduled between Paddington and Windsor. The Lord Chamberlain issued the invitations. Mark Twain was accompanied by Ralph Ashcroft (left), and Mr. and Mrs. John Henniker Heaton. See insert photo [MTFWE 27].
June 23 Friday – Tuckey puts this day as the last work Sam did on “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” [135]. Note: also, Starrett, MT Encyc. 736.
June 23 Sunday – At Brown’s Hotel in London, Sam wrote to daughter Jean in Katonah, N.Y.
I have been having a rather perfect good time since we reached England last Tuesday morning. The first greeting was a hail & a hurrah from the stevedores on the dock; & since then I have climbed all the rounds of the ladder & shaken hands with all the grades, from the stevedores on up to king & queen.
June 24 Saturday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Joe Twichell. After several pages of bile dumped about Theodore Roosevelt, though he believed “praise & blame” were “unwarrantable terms when applied to coffee-mills”—in other words, man has no more control over his acts than a coffee-mill—Sam wrote of his work and daughters:
I began a new book here in this enchanting solitude 35 days ago. I have done 33 full days’ work on it. To-day I have not worked. There was another day in this present month wherein I did not work—you will know that date without my telling you.
June 24 Sunday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam gave Lyon instructions to write Ralph W. Ashcroft about a perceived “insulting advertisement” by Harpers, which stated that he was going to withdraw his Christian Science book from publication. Would Ashcroft look in Publisher’s Weekly for April 1903? [MTP].
Sam also replied to the June 22 of Brander Matthews (the note sent by hand to 121 E. 18 , NYC).
June 24 Monday – At Brown’s Hotel in London Ralph W. Ashcroft wrote for Sam to Marie Corelli.
“Mark Twain thanks you for having saved him from the crime of high treason to literature & he will accordingly visit the tomb & house of the Bard of Avon & take luncheon with you—if it will be convenient to you—a Saturday June 29th which is the only possible date” [MTP].
June 25 Sunday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Frederick A. Duneka.
June 25 Tuesday – This day’s issue of Punch was dedicated to Mark Twain, and included a full-page cartoon, by Bernard Partridge (see insert); the original would be presented to Sam at the July 9 Punch dinner by little Joy Agnew. The New York Times, June 26, 1907, p. 5, ran a Special Cablegram article on the “certification” of Mark Twain as a humorist by the publication.
MARK TWAIN HUMOR APPROVED BY PUNCH
June 26 Monday – Sam wrote the poem “Apostrophe to Death,” not published in his lifetime:
O Death, O sweet & gracious friend,
I bare my smitten head to Thee, & at thy sacred feet
I set my life’s extinguished lamp & lay my bruised heart
[Tuckey, “The ‘Me’ and the Machine” 135; Scott, Poetry MT 126-7]. Note: Hill gives the title as “An Invocation to Death” (as does Miss Lyon in the entry below) and notes that Sam read the poem to the “cozy group around the fire, and the next day Miss Lyon was ‘weak with the wonder of that poem’ all day long” [110].
June 26 Wednesday – The big day in Oxford, England: The Encoeonia (conferring of degrees) took place at the Sheldonian Theater in the morning.
Exactly one month later, Sam wrote of the affair:
June 27 Tuesday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: All day I’ve been weak with the wonder of that poem [See June 26 journal]. Mr. Clemens made some corrections in it and then let me take it— to read and read this morning. Later he came down stairs and talked about the kind of woman Mrs. Howells is. I’d just been saying that according to the way that Mr. Howells has depicted womankind in “Miss Billard’s Inspiration” [sic] he must have either an enchanting wife, or an utterly inconsequential one, and I think it is probably the latter, but there is that inconsequential side to every woman anyway.
June 27 Thursday – Sam attended the Oxford Pageant. The Oxford Chronicle, June 28, p.16, “Yesterday at the Pageant” reported Sam’s appearance at 3:45 p.m. The London Daily Express, reported on the gala event, (June 28, p. 1, “Pageant in the Mist”) and on Mark Twain’s attendance:
The first performance of the Oxford Pageant began yesterday [June 27] in a blaze of glory, and closed—amid cheers—in a Scotch mist.
June 28 Wednesday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.
This is a line to say there’s a report in Norfolk, Conn. (which we are doing what we can to keep out of the papers) that Clara’s horse has been running away with her. It isn’t so. It was her horse, but she wasn’t in the carriage.
Jean & I expect to go see Clara in a few days—as soon as we get a permit from the doctor, which may come any day now. It is pretty cold weather here, but we don’t mind it.
With warm regards to both of you [MTHHR 587-8].
June 28 Friday – Though all 27 days Sam spent in England were busy, Sam labeled this day as especially so. From Sam’s A.D. for July 30:
June 29 Thursday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to daughter Clara in Norfolk, Conn.
Ah dear heart, I am very sorry you are not going to be able to sing the Two Grenadiers BUT I shan’t be sorry if you are with us instead of out on the concert stage singing for strangers.
Yes, my bronchial affection is in a sense permanent: my port lung got a permanent damage in Berlin, & if I should catch 500 colds they would all be followed by bronchitis.