April 4 Friday – On board the Kanawha en route from Nassau, Bahamas to Jacksonville, Fla., Sam wrote to Livy.
We are off the coast of Florida, Livy darling, & shall reach Jacksonville this evening about 8. Dr. Rice expects to catch a train there before midnight & go home, for he has learned by telegraph that Mrs. Rice & one of the girls will leave for a vacation in Italy pretty soon. He says he will call you up on the telephone & give you such news as he can about the yacht & her purposes. He can’t well go to Riverdale. I shall miss his pleasant society. Also his helpfulness; he prepares my bath almost every morning. I prepare his—when I am up first, which is not very often [MTP].
Sam’s notebook: “Off coast of Florida, 8 a m Col. Payne [sic Paine] & Reed (in a.m.) played poker & Reed won 23 pots in succession. Payne won no pot. Last hand: Reed had ace-King, & drew 2 aces. Payne had 2 queens & drew another. / Landbird,—no land” [NB 45 TS 8-9].
Sam’s ship log : “Off coast of Florida—morning. Paine & Reed played poker, & Reed won 23 pots in succession. This without prayer or other unfair advantage. Paine won not a single pot during the conflict— Reed got the first & the last, & all between; then Paine jumped the game & went below to replenish his vocabulary. …” [MTP]. Note: last hand same as in above NB entry.
The Kanawha reached Charleston, S.C. and the men visited the World’s Fair, spending about six hours ashore. “It resembled a funeral; nobody there; it is a dead failure.” Dr. Clarence C. Rice left for home on the train; “he was sea-sick every other day during the trip, yet I couldn’t get him to go on a plasmon diet & be comfortable” [Apr. 5 to Livy]. Note: President Theodore Roosevelt would attend the fair on Apr. 9.
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, now in N.Y. wrote to Sam, enclosing his sonnet and asking where he might get it published. He’d been trying to get out to see him ever since he wrote about Carnegie, but he was unable to. “Another friend who knows Carnegie well took the same cheerless view you did and I abandoned the idea” [MTP].