December 7 Saturday – Sam’s notebook: “Col. Harvey. Metropolitan Club. 1.30 / Has Tarkington a wife?” [NB 44 TS 19]. Note: Booth Tarkington (1869-1946; born Newton Booth Tarkington in Indianapolis), would marry Laurel Fletcher in 1902. He was likely now so engaged (they divorced in 1911 and he remarried). A novelist and dramatist, he was best known for Pulitzer prize-winning novels, The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. His affluent family lost much of its wealth in the panic of 1873.

In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote to Franklin G. Whitmore, enclosing $100.

The madam won’t allow the house to be advertised for sale. That settles it! She would feel homeless if she sold that house before she knew that there was some other place that she preferred to live in.

And so, there’s nothing to do but wait till an offer volunteers on a 2 per. cent commission basis. Then we’ll report to her [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Jules Hart. Only the envelope survives [MTP].

Charles Tilden Sempers’ three-column biographical sketch of Mark Twain ran in the New York Times, p. BR4.

Sam spent some time in the City as revealed by William Dean Howells’ Dec. 8 to Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

Yesterday [Dec. 7]…walking with Clemens to his train under a pink New York sunset sky, that you knew the like of. He has no time table, but all the gatemen and train starters are proud to know him, and lay hold of him, and put him aboard something that leaves for Riverdale. He always has to go to the W.C., me dancing in the corridor, and holding his train for him. But they would not let it go without him, if it was the Chicago limited! What a fame and a force he is! It’s astonishing how he holds out, but I hate to have him eating so many dinners, and writing so few books [MTHL 2: 735n2].