January 26 Wednesday - In Hamilton, Bermuda Sam wrote to Margaret Blackmer in Greenwich, Conn.
Dear Margaret— / So you have reached Rosemary Hall at last. I know it must be recently, or you would have run up to see me at Stormfield.
I suppose I shant see Stormfield again very soon, I have no sorrowful associations with Bermuda, so I expect to spend a good deal of my time here in future, I am not in any hurry to go back to America.
You & my Bermuda angel-fish are about the same age, and a couple of years ago about the same stature, and could have been weighed in the grocer’s balances - - - but now!
Well, now it’s a job for the hay-scales, Oh, stop growing, Margaret dear! / With lots of love, / ... [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Mrs. Margaret Illington Bowes in Tacoma, Wash.
You dear Margaret!
I am so glad to know you are happy! for I love you so. Some are born for one thing, some for another; but you were specially born to love & be loved, & be happy—& so things are with you now as they ought to be.
I fled to Bermuda when the disaster fell—the double disaster, for Clara was gone into permanent exile 13 days before Jean was set free from the swindle of this life. Stormfield was a desolation, its charm all gone, and I could not stay there.
My ship has gone down, but my raft has landed me in the Islands of the Blest, and I am as happy as any other shipwrecked sailor ever was. I shan’t go “home” till - - - oh, bye and bye, I don’t know when—there’s no hurry. Hurry? Why, there’s no hurry about anything; suddenly the hurry has all gone out of my life.
Bless your dear heart, I love you so! [MTP]. Note: Margaret Illington, Sam’s unofficial Angel Fish, had divorced Daniel Frohman in Nov. 1909 and married Edward Bowes (1874-1946), who would become famous for his Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio show in the 1930s, which morphed into Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour in. 1947,
Sam also began a letter to Elizabeth Wallace that he finished on Jan. 29.
Dear Betsy—
No, revelation—of a valuable sort—does not come through sorrow when one is old. Before 70 the whole satire & swindle of life has been revealed—to all except the wilfully or constitutionally dull. What a silly invention human life is! & how like a glove its silliest religion fits it! & how perfectly our principal God & His Fambly harmonise with the outfit! .
Do I “know more” than I knew before? Oh, hell no! There was nothing to learn, (about hereafters & other-such undesirables), there has never been anything to learn & know about those insulting mysteries. |I am happy—few are so happy—but I get none of this happiness from “knowing more” of the unknowable than I knew before [MTP].
Albert Bigelow Paine wrote from Redding:
“Your enclosing check for $3800- came yesterday, and I will send the cheque down for deposit, today.” He gave more check and dividend deposit detail. “That Haithwaite letter is a gem: Ashcroftian in every line, only a trifle more clumsy—more openly vulgar. The boy is young; time will do much for him; he will acquire all the art and artifice of the master, by and by. I think his letter ought to be framed. / And was there ever a greater contrast in letters than between Haithwaite’s and Howells’s?” Paine told Twain he was lucky to be in Lotus land and deserved it [MTP].
Mary E. Clagget (Mrs. William H. Clagett) wrote to Sam.
Dear old friend;
I was grieved on receiving a Boston paper yesterday, to see you were in ill health, and my heart goes out to you in your sickness and sorrow; and I have been thinking of my girlish days with Belle Stott, Ella Creel, and Ella Patterson when you were an occasional visitor on the Hill in Keokuk; then of our friendship in Nevada, when we saw & heard more of your witticisms, & your meteor stay enlivened life for all of us. Do you rernember the evening you spent at Judge Wellington Stewarts? when you came to pay your respects to Billy Clagetts Bride, in the Fall of 1862? ... [she goes on to relate the birth of her daughters Mary and Ida up to 1863] ... You went back to civilization and fame and honors went with you, and you have blessed the world with your pen, and good humor ever since. God bless you and be with you, and spare you many years yet to cheer the lonely wayfarers in the wilderness and at last bring you into His holy peace and Eternal joy, is the humble prayer of your old friend, / Mrs. Wm. H. Claggett [MTP].