To all friends of Hartford's autumn Twain-Twichell walk:

   The walk this year is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 8.

    For those who may be hearing about this for the first time, each year
(give or take a couple) since 1995 an informal Hartford group has walked
from the Mark Twain House eight miles to Heublein Tower in Talcott Mountain
State Park west of the city. We roughly retrace the route Mark Twain and the
Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell took each fall to Bartlett's Tower, which stood
on the crest of Talcott Mountain in the 1870s in roughly the same spot. This
year marks ten years since the first of our walks.

     Twain's and Twichell's walks and conversation were an important part of
the men's friendship throughout the 1870s and 1880s and they often referred
to them in their correspondence. On one such walk Twichell suggested Twain
"hurl" his Mississippi reminiscences into a magazine, which ultimately led
to "Life on the Mississippi." Twain reported that he would read his bawdy
masterpiece "1601" aloud at a rest stop on the way to the Tower. Twichell,
for his part, got ideas for sermons and relayed a rich trove of Civil War
and other anecdotes.

   "I have been thinking of you all the morning," Twichell in Hartford wrote
to Twain in Europe in October 1878. "It is one of those golden, perfect
autumn days when one's desire to be off somewhere among trees, mounts to a
passion and can hardly be refused. Had you been home I should have been
after you betimes; and by by now we should be bathing our souls and bodies
in the delicious tinted light of the wood paths of Talcott Mountain, kicking
the yellow and red October leaves before us (Oh, the sweet rustle of 'em!)
and having a talk, old fellow. There never was such weather as is upon us
now. It really seems ungrateful and wicked not to give all the time to it
one possibly can."

     So we do give it some time. We follow city streets and suburban roads;
picnic and do a few readings at the Auer 4-H Farm on the way up; follow the
"delicious tinted light of the wood paths" to the Tower; rest and chat some
more, examine the wonderful work the Friends of Heublein Tower has done up
there (see www.friendsofheubleintower.org), take a look at the "royal view"
of the Farmington Valley and ultimately carpool back to the Mark Twain
House.

     We gather at the Mark Twain House before 7:30 a.m. (there's a reason
for this: the Greater Hartford Marathon closes the streets in the area at
that time) and step off about 8. It is an eight-mile walk through Hartford
and suburbs to the Tower. We leave the Tower via cars left nearby no later
than 2:30 p.m. (I'll be seeking volunteers to get up early and leave these
cars up on the mountain.)

     Let me know if you're coming! We have to limit participants to 30, so
be sure to pre-register if you're interested; details will follow.

     This should also be the last year that there won't be a book about Joe
Twichell in print, as "The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A
Chaplain's Story," edited by Peter Messent and myself, will be coming comes
out from the University of Georgia Press in March 2006.

Yours for pedestrian enjoyment,

Steve Courtney