November 5 Friday — William Dean Howells wrote from N.Y.C. to Sam.
Dear Clemens: / I wanted to come to you tomorrow and so did Pilla; but we are bound hand and foot with engagements Saturday and Sunday. | would propose myself for next week, only my brother Joe, on his way back to his consulate at Turks Island, is to be with us, and I can't leave. Let me offer for a later date. I have a good deal of talk in me, and I should like to hear some gab from you. I have been hearing your gab, for I have gone again to your books for my good night cheer and downhearted days, and found you as gay as you used to be, in those blessed short things of yours. There never was anybody like you, and there won’t be. Just the same Clara and I held you up to obloquy when she called, the other morning. She’s been having a high old honeymoon, hasn’t she, poor girl, with appendicitis in the house the first thing. But surgery seems to follow us all. I came home to find my poor wife in bed, here, after an operation a in Boston hospital. She and her sister had kept it from Pilla and me, even sending their letters to be posted from Kittery Point; and we knew nothing about it till we went into her room here. She had some swollen glands removed, and an anxiety of twenty years standing. In 1889 I went with her to see a great New York specialist, and he divinely reassured us. The next day the family found him dead on the floor of his coupe after a drive home from Brooklyn. Such is life-——and death. We found we were of the same age, and he said, “Well, how do you like your work?” “How do you like yours?” “Well, I don’t jump to it.”—You see, I am trying to cheer you up now, in return for the gayety I got out of your books. Don’t thank me; I hate gratitude. Yours ever / W.D. Howells [MTHL 2:848).