May 23 Wednesday – Sam’s notebook: “Dinner here to the Gilders & Chapins? ? ? / Offered $10,000 a year to edit ‘Judge’—the labor required estimated at ‘one hour’ of my time ‘per week.’ Can’t accept” [NB 43 TS 12].

At dawn, Irving S. Underhill, bothered by the charade played the night before sent a messenger with a letter to Sam about the $500 which he had owed since 1893. Underhill regretted “his inability to pay, but saying that he knew he would shortly be able to do so when he returned to America from this trip, which he was taking for his health” [The Gleaner Vol. 1, No. 8, Mar. 1928 p.18]. Sam then wrote the following letter.

At 30 Wellington Court in London, England Sam wrote to Irving S. Underhill.

It is straight & honorable in you to wish to pay that $500; but even if you owed it (which you do not, ) I would not allow you to pay a penny of it. You have had a harder time of it than I, & a longer acquaintance with the supreme misery of debt. I know that treadmill, & no man must ever tread it for me, now that I know what it is. Drop it out of your mind & memory, & do not let it intrude there again.

Sam also thanked Underhill for the “pleasant time last night” and wished them a pleasant voyage. He also praised an unspecified poem [MTP; Gribben 720]. Note: See Oct. 20, 1893 and earlier entries on this the second $500 that Sam never received for his “Adam’s Diary” sketch that ran in the Niagara book by Underhill.