April 14 Tuesday – In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote to William Dean Howells.
I shall do my best to enclose the enclosure, & be to that degree eccentric.
It is mighty interesting, but I don’t know whether to allow your work “strange” or not, for it is a thing which happens with the persistency of sunrise. Patents are not frequently born in singles; no, they are twins or triplets. The Patent Office is a vast lying-in hospital for such. As soon as a man breeds a new idea his trencher out mental machinery gives it telepathically away to as many as a million persons round about the globe, & they all think they bred it. Only two or three of them are capable of doing anything with it. You gave Dr. Breen’s Practice to a million, but none but the Rochester girl happened to be in the literary line & able to put it on paper. The sumach culmination was felicitously dramatic—& in that way unusual—but the Breen culmination was more so. And very dramatic also, & prompt & on time, was the case where Voltaire & Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote the same story in the same fortnight, with half a continent between them. I don’t regard as frauds the several claimants to Beautiful Snow & Rock me to… [the rest of the letter is lost] [MTHL 2: 767].
Note:the enclosure is likely “the telepathic story about the sumac,” which Howells would write more about on May 10. Dr. Breen’s Practice, by Howells; see n2 in source. “Beautiful Snow” by John W. Watson, a well known ballad.
Albert Brandt, publisher The Arena magazine, Trenton, N.J., wrote to Sam, offering to publish the Christian Science book since he’d read that Harpers had withdrawn publication. He mentioned what Daniel Carter Beard had told him about CY, that it had “suffered at the hands of some publisher” [MTP]. Note: Brandt would suffer bankruptcy in 1909.