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