No letters written between 30 October and 5 November 1873 have been found. The Batavia reached New York on Sunday, 2 November. The Clemenses were met by Olivia’s mother and brother, as well as by Orion Clemens, who had been in New York for some weeks looking for work. On 3 November Orion wrote to his wife, Mollie:
Sam and Livy and Susie got home here last night about dusk, all right, after some sea sickness all round. Susie runs about and talks a little, and is exceedingly pretty, having a rather broad face with color in her cheeks. I enclose a notice of Sam’s lecture which I cut from the world sometime ago. He had a fine large audience, who applauded him heartily in his descriptive portions, which his American audiences failed to do, seeming to relish only nonsense, or rather as if they did not allow him to talk anything but nonsense. He starts back next Saturday to lecture several weeks in England. The first lecture is to be the first of December in London. Whether he will go into the provinces or not is not yet decided. . . . They start for Hartford to-morrow at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Langdon is going with them. . . .
Charlie Langdon was here, but left this afternoon. He got Sam’s luggage ashore, had a suit of a large fine parlor and two other rooms engaged for him, and one for his mother, and attended to some other business about signing papers. (CU-MARK)
The suite of rooms that Charles Langdon had reserved for the Clemenses was probably at the Windsor Hotel (see 12 Oct 73 to Langdon, n. 1click to open link). (Clara Spaulding and her mother checked into Barnum’s Hotel at Broadway and Twentieth Street, where Henry Spaulding had arrived the day before.) Orion reported to Mollie that the “president of the Mercantile Library Association sent up his card ‘four times,’” in the hope of getting a chance to propose a lecture engagement. He also noted that on the evening of 3 November the Clemenses went to see Edwin Booth in Hamlet. Albert Bigelow Paine attributed to Orion a detail that does not appear in his letter to Mollie: “Booth sent for Sam to come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet, the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately” ( MTB , 1:495; “Passengers Arrived,” New York Times, 3 Nov 73, 8; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 1 Nov 73 and 3 Nov 73, 3; Odell, 9:385). On 4 November the Clemenses returned to Hartford, accompanied by Mrs. Langdon, who planned to stay there for a visit, since Clemens was scheduled to embark again for England in less than a week.