No letters written between 29 July and 16 August have been found. On 31 July, the Clemens family left for a vacation at Bateman’s Point near Newport, Rhode Island. There they stayed at the popular summer resort, a “spacious and complete establishment” on an old farm at the corner of Ridge Road and Castle Hill Avenue, that had been owned and run by Seth Bateman (b. 1802) for more than thirty years (Bayles, 575; Van Rensselaer, 82).
William Wright accompanied the Clemenses to Newport, bringing his manuscript for The Big Bonanza. He stayed for a week, later reporting about the area in a letter to the Virginia City Enterprise (Wright 1875). On 9 August, back at work on his book at the Union Hall Hotel in Hartford, he wrote to his sister (CU-BANC):
I did not stop in the town, but went with Mark and family to a farmhouse about four miles out—out on the extreme west point of the island. A very breezy place it was and a foggy place. During the week I was there we had but two days of sunshine. . . . At Bateman’s Point, where we stopped, we had water on three sides of us. Went to sleep every night by the roar of the ocean and could look out of my window on waking in the morning and see ships passing while still lying in bed. . . . I went down to Newport in order to get Mark to read my manuscript. He is very indolent and after reading about a thousand pages said it was all right—he did not want to read any more.
After Wright’s departure the Clemenses received invitations from at least two literary acquaintances. On 12 August, clergyman and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson urged them to come hear a lecture on natural history given by Alexander Agassiz, who had established a zoological research station at Newport (CU-MARK). And on 20 August poet and social reformer Julia Ward Howe invited them to a “Blue Tea”; she asked her guests “to bring at least four lines of verse, or a paragraph of prose, or a written excuse for not bringing either” (CU-MARK). Higginson sent another invitation on 24 August, suggesting that the Clemenses come hear him read from old journals “describing Newport society during the Revolution, especially while the French officers were here” (CU-MARK).
Clemens entertained himself with a pastime he recalled in 1907:
Twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at Bateman’s Point, near Newport, Rhode Island. It was a humble and comfortable boarding place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but the male sex were scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides myself, and he and I had good times—Higgins was his name, but that was not his fault. He was a very pleasant and companionable person. On the premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. It was a single alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty years. . . . The surface of that alley consisted of a rolling stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could by any art known to us persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should accomplish something. . . . We examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two.
Over the course of several days—and even nights, playing by candle-light—the participants perfected their game. Clemens cheerfully recalled besting a “modest and courteous officer of the regular army” who prided himself on his skill at bowling, but was bewildered and utterly defeated by the irregularities of the alley. After his embarrassing defeat, the officer asked,
“What is the prize for the ten-strike?”
We had to confess that we had not selected it yet.
He said, gravely, that he thought there was no occasion for hurry about it.
I believe Bateman’s alley was a better one than any other in America, in the matter of the essentials of the game. It compelled skill; it provided opportunity for bets; and if you could get a stranger to do the bowling for you, there was more and wholesomer and delightfuler entertainment to be gotten out of his industries than the finest game by the best expert, and played upon the best alley elsewhere in existence, could furnish. (AD, 23 Jan 1907, CU-MARK, in AMT , 135-38)
Clemens’s skill at the game was recalled the following year by a fellow vacationer, the inventor Ross Winans, who wrote, “We miss you very much at Newport this summer. We have not so much as entered that bowling alley yet. I doubt very much whether your champion score has been beaten by anyone” (18 Aug 76, CU-MARK).
At Bateman’s Point Clemens escaped Hartford’s summer heat, but he could not as successfully avoid all work. On 16 August Howells sent him a batch of proofsheets to read for a story scheduled for anonymous publication in the October Atlantic Monthly—“The Curious Republic of Gondour,” an ironic tale that took aim at the American political system (SLC 1875). The following note accompanied the proofsheets (CU-MARK):
The proofsheets, with Clemens’s name struck out, must have gone directly to the Atlantic printers, in Cambridge. Clemens presumably answered Howells shortly after 16 August, but no such letter has been found.