July 25 Saturday – At Quarry Farm in Elmira, N.Y. Sam wrote to William Dean Howells.
O, hellfire! as Mrs. Clemens says when stirred to vexed admiration, you incurable old ass, how could you go & put me under the thousand-ton weight of a book to watch & care for? I’ve long long ago stopped borrowing books because I suffer so while they are in the house, & I never could remember to return one. Oh, that volume of Heine! The worrying nights it cost me! Indeed & double-deed, no man leaveth a valued book in my responsibility if I catch him at it!
All our books are packed & gone into storage for Italy. Come over there & see us & we will look. We sent a couple of bushels to the little Riverdale library, & I am instructing Miss Lyon to go there & look.
Florentine address——set it down:
Villa Papiniano, San Dominico.
It’s on the slant of the slope & a little to looard of Fiesole. Fiske is not far away. We’ve got it for a year. Our ship is the “Princess Irene,” a new 13,000-tonner; goes to Genoa; sails from Hoboken Oct. 24, reaches Genoa Nov. 6. With love to you all [MTHL 773-4]. Note: the negotiations for Villa Papiniano were unsuccessful due to shifting demands by the owners (see Smith to his mother, Sept. 20); the family took the Villa di Quarto.
Sam also wrote to Harriet E. Whitmore (Mrs. Franklin G. Whitmore.
Yes, put it in the Courant if you wish—& I think I would say it is from a private letter to a Hartford friend, so that it will have the look of what it is: an entirely voluntary utterance, & by that same token an honest one.
Mrs. Clemens will be very glad if you will take care of the Gifford picture, etc., for her. I have a sort of dim & shadowy recollection of those things, but that is all—nothing definite. I remember spending an evening with Gifford, ages ago.
Mrs. Clemens sends you an affluence of love—& a job, too. She says will you—some time when you are down town, (when the weather gets cool) for there is no hurry—look at the laces in her silver-box in the Safe Deposit & see if they are all right & suffering no injury? And she will be very thankful…. [MTP]. Note: likely Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) of the Hudson River School of painters. In May-July 1867 Sam noted Gifford’s painting “Sunrise on the Seashore” [ MTNJ 1: 318n20]. This, however, predates his courtship with Livy. Robert Swain Gifford (1840-1905) is also a possibility.