December 22 Tuesday – Sam’s notebook: “ What is so rare as a day in June? That is this day, exactly. Brilliant sun, balmy air, heavy with the odor of roses” [: NB 46 TS 31; Gribben 427 in part]. Note: refers to a line from James Russell Lowell’s “Prelude” to The Vision of Sir Launfal (1861).
Joseph Blouin, builder, billed Sam $306.66 for additional repairs to the Tarrytown house; paid Jan. 15, 1904 [1903 Financials file MTP].
T.G. Ford wrote from Florence, Italy to Sam, enclosing a ticket of Membership in the Florence Section of the United States Navy League. The Journal was sent to each member and he hoped Sam’s copy had arrived. “The project is finding favor in Florence,” he wrote [MTP].
Joe Twichell wrote to Sam, cheered by the recent note of Livy’s progress. He also wrote:
If you have received the letter pamphlet I mailed you last week—I had to get it from New York, which took three days—you know that it was not to Yale that Daniel Hand bequeathed the pile his grand partner made for him, but to the emancipated slaves who had raised the cotton out of which it was made; which, to my mind, is a fine thing, in fact a thing approaching the sublime [MTP]. Note: Daniel Hand (1801-1891), Connecticut philanthropist. In 1888 he gave to the American missionary Assoc. more than one million dollars, to be held in trust and known as the Daniel Hand Educational Fund for Colored People, to be used in the old slave states.