Just weeks before his death in April 1910, Samuel Clemens – who could make a joke out of anything – wrote out instructions for what to do at the gates of Heaven. These included: “Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

For his entire life, he admired the canine breed. “We cannot all be as good & sweet & lovely as a good dog,” he wrote, “but we can all try.” Stray and domestic dogs were a constant presence in the Missouri town of his childhood, and he observed their habits with vivid accuracy. He discoursed on the dogs of Constantinople in his bestselling travel book, The Innocents Abroad, the result of a trip to Europe and the Middle East. Dogs were a part of the domestic scene in his settled life in Hartford, and were adored by his daughters.

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, dogs wait by the table for the reveling knights, ladies, and lords to toss them a bone so they could “growl over it, and gnaw it, and grease the floor with it.” In Australia in 1896, Clemens wrote sympathetically of the scorned dingo, a wild dog relative. In his final days, a German shepherd shared his room with him.

While in Hartford we know of at least five dogs owned by the Clemenese. One was a very large dog named Flash. We can tell how big he is because we have pictures of him with the girls on the House’s front porch.

The girls also had a dog named Rab, and three puppies named I Know, You Know, and Don’t Know.

We also know that another dog lived on property, probably over in the carriage house with Patrick McAleer and his family, because in May 1880, Samuel paid $2.15 to the Hartford Town Clerk for a dog license, marking it down in his account books as “Dog license for Jip the coach dog.”

“The difference between Papa & Mama is that Mama loves morals & Papa loves cats.” – Susy Clemens, quoted by Clara Clemens, in My Father, Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens’s fondness for felines started at an early age, as cats were the only animal that his mother allowed in the house. Clemens recalled in his autobiography, “We had nineteen cats at one time…they were a vast burden to us all—including my mother—but they were out of luck and that was enough; they had to stay. However, better these than no pets at all.” Over the years, and many cats later, his opinion of these four-legged cohorts grew from indifference to a strong affection that made him one of history’s most legendary cat lovers.

Clemens always made sure that he was surrounded with cat companions. Cats played with his daughters in the Hartford house; he rented cats while staying for the summer in Dublin, New Hampshire; he placed kittens into the pockets of his billiard table in Redding, Connecticut. “Some people scorn a cat and think it not an essential,” he admitted, “but the Clemens tribe are not of these.”

Because cats were such an integral part of his private life, it should come as no surprise that they make frequent appearances throughout his literature. Some of his real-life experiences with felines inspired things he penned, including scenes from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and an early New York Sunday Mercury sketch entitled “Tom Wolf and the Cats,” in which a friend of the narrator takes off after some noisy tomcats on an icy roof, with dire consequences. Despite his strong affections for many other creatures, nothing seems to beat his admiration and love for the cat.

Clemens liked to give them silly names, and once noted that some of them “died early on account of being over-weighted with their names.”

These are the known names of Samuel’s cats: Stray Kit, Abner, Motley, Fraulein, Lazy, Buffalo Bill,, Soapy Sall, Cleveland, Sour Mash, Pestilence, Billiards, Babylon, Famine, Ananda, Annanci, Sindbad, Bones, Appollinaris, Zoroaster, Blatherskite, Socrates, Belshazzar, Old Minniecat, Tammany, Satan, Sackcloth, Bambino, Sin, Ashes, and Oleomargarine.

Pets weren’t the only animals in the Clemenses household. Their coachman Patrick McAleer was in charge of the cows, horses, ducks and geese that lived in the carriage house and fields surrounding the house. The most important part of Patrick’s job was to take care of these animals, especially the horses that pulled the Clemens family’s carriages and sleighs. While in Hartford, the Clemenses owned at least two horses, one of whom was named Max. Clara and Jean loved to sit up front in the carriage with Patrick and help him hold the reins. He also went out with the girls riding on horseback. Jean loved horses so much that her father joked she might grow up to be a jockey and live in the stable.

Middle daughter Clara, however, preferred her pet calf, Jumbo, who she rode regularly. After Jumbo had thrown the little girl twice, McAleer sold the calf. Clara describes the result in a chapter called “The Clemens Temper” in her 1931 memoir, My Father, Mark Twain.

“When Patrick, the coachman, confessed to me, when I appeared in the barn the next morning following my second “throw,” that he had sold “Jumbo,” I raised such a hullabaloo that my screams reached even my father’s study. He came running down to snatch me from danger. When he discovered the cause of my misery, he was most sympathetic and told Patrick he would have to buy the calf back immediately; which was done that very day. Father could always be depended upon to see that the fair thing was done, and although he had no particular liking for cows, big or little, he loved animals in general and could understand the pain I felt in being separated from my pet.”

For a little while, Clara and Susy kept two pet squirrels in a small room on the third floor of the house until their father discovered they had chewed up the floor and window frames. When Clara Clemens returned to the Mark Twain House in the 1920s, she annotated floor plans of the house with what she remembered from living there. On the third floor she noted which closet held the squirrels.