Greetings! The tinge of autumn in the air today reminds me to tell you know
that our Twichell-Twain walk this year is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 9.
There will be further publicity and other hoopla in September, but save that
date!

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 west of the city. We 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.

They walked, talked and took in the view; Twain once read his bawdy work
"1601" aloud to try it out on the pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational
Church, as he tried many "doubtful things." Others accompanied them
sometimes, including the students of the Chinese Educational Mission and the
writer and newspaper editor Charles Dudley Warner.

We picnic, do a few readings up there, and carpool back to the Mark Twain
House.

Like Twain and Twichell, we don't regard this as a hike or -thon of any
kind, but as a walk. We return, as Twain said they did, not foot-sore but
jaw-sore.

Twichell himself wrote, in a letter to his father during the Civil War, "a
song, a joke, an arousing of interest in something outside the present, will
slip a quarter-mile from under the feet wonderfully."

I'm sending this to people I've met here and there in my own Twichell
biographical researches, including some far afield! Hope to see you then. If
you'd like to go, let me know soon; we have to limit the group to 30 and
after publicity comes out in September it fills up fast.

Steve Courtney
Terryville, CT