Barbara Schmidt may have a point here about Twain's attendance at Whitman's 1887 Lincoln lecture in Madison Square Theater in NYC. I stated in my biography (WALT WHITMAN: THE SONG OF HIMSELF, 1999) that Twain was there. My source was William Sloane Kennedy's REMINISCENCES OF WALT WHITMAN, 1896 (a volume I can't right now put my hands on). I too found no journalistic references to Twain's presence that evening in the NEW YORK TIMES and probably should have thought twice about including that information. Other early sources for the lecture which cite accounts of attending celebrities and exclude Twain are William E. Barton's LINCOLN AND WHITMAN, 1928, and Clara Barrus's WHITMAN AND BURROUGHS, COMRADES, 1931. Justin Kaplan does not put Twain at the lecture in either his Twain or Whitman biography. Daniel Mark Epstein's recent study of Whitman and Lincoln, 2004, includes Twain at the lecture but, as Ed Folsom notes, gives no clear or originally cited source. Gay Wilson Allen's biography of Whitman, THE SOLITARY SINGER, 1955, also states that Twain was present, but it gives no source for the information. Now that I am working closely with Twain, it strikes me as odd that no contemporary account would mention Twain, who was probably the most famous of the group in question.