February 24 Sunday – Sam’s notebook: “Hapgood dinner 49 W. 57” [NB 44 TS 6].

Nathan Kite family and the William L. Price family wrote to Sam that his picture was on their wall and they’d “adopted” him as a saint: “A long and useful like to thee in the cause of brother man” [MTP].

William Dean Howells wrote his sister, Miss Aurelia Howells, and included a paragraph about Mark Twain which is rather instructive of their activities during this time:

I see a great deal of Mark Twain nowadays, and we have high good times denouncing everything. We agree perfectly about the Boer war and the Filipino war, and war generally. Then, we are old fellows, and it is pleasant to find the world so much worse than it was when we were young. Clemens is, as I have always known him, a most right-minded man, and of course he has an intellect that I enjoy. He is getting some hard knocks now from the blackguards and hypocrites for his righteous fun with McKinley’s attempt to colonize the Philippines, but he is making hosts of friends, too [Life in letters of William Dean Howells,” Mildred Howells, ed. p.142].

Alice May, Sec’y for the Boston Teacher’s Club wrote to Sam: “I have been reading the Review of Reviews and am filled with shame and remorse that I should have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston and talk to teachers! / But I do thank you for not saying, ‘You should have known better!’” [MTP].

Lucy Potts wrote to Sam [MTP]. UCCL 43592 letter is currently unavailable.

Mulberry Sellers of Massachusetts wrote to challenge Sam’s use of the name for the Gilded Age. Lucius Lampton writes:

Ironically, a “Mulberry Sellers arose to challenge Twain’s final selection of a name. A Massachusetts-born “Mulberry Sellers” reprimanded the author in a letter of 24 February 1901. “Horrible Sir,’ he addressed Twain, “you are the evil genius of my family.” This Sellers then began to explain how sharing a name with Twain’s popular character afflicted relatives William Sellers and George Escol Sellers. This Mulberry closed his letter fiercely: “Must I bore you full of holes? Blood! Blood! Blood! I shall challenge you to mortal combat. I give you notice so you can fix up your soul (if any) for flight. Prepare to die”….

Twain noted “Blood!” in quotes on the back of the letter. Although there is a strong possibility that this letter was a practical joke, or perhaps a protest by some member of the Sellers family using the name of Mulberry for effect or cover, such an actual Mulberry Sellers might indeed have existed and written this letter in sincere indignation. Within the ludicrous threats is a delicious irony that surely pleased Twain: after two name changes more than twenty-six years earlier, here a living “Mulberry Sellers” rises out of the “vasty deeps of uncharted space” to object. The statute of limitations proved no shelter for a literary man [54].