October 10 Friday – Sam’s notebook: “THE DUEL. Next month tell it at the East Side House Settlement, for the purpose of drawing an instructive moral from it—& then forget what the moral was. ‘Now I come to the moral’ Reflect long (& embarrassingly for the audience). Give it up & sit down” [NB 45 TS 30].
Sam’s NB of Oct. 11: “Yesterday [Oct. 10] went to Boston with Howells, & I completed the RR arrangements with the Boston & Maine & N.Y. Central—as follows: / with / Invalid car from York Harbor to Riverdale without change. Time, 8.45 a.m. (York): 5.40 p.m. (Grand Central;) about 6, Riverdale. Whole cost, $339. It is special train from York to East Somerville (2 hours) & from Grand Central to Riverdale (25 minutes.[)] / Sent the check yesterday (Sat.)” [NB 45 TS 30].
Sam went to Boston with William Dean Howells to make arrangements for the transportation of Livy by private invalid rail car on Oct. 16. Howells wrote: “Clemens and I had a ghostly afternoon together in October, lunching in …Young’s, and fighting off the specters who wanted to sit down with us” [MTHL 2: 747n1]. Howells later wrote:
I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up the best means of her conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him: the sort of invalid-car he could get; how she could be carried to the village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New York and left at Riverdale. There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual means [MMT 91].
Henry C. Griffin, attorney in Tarrytown, NY, wrote to Sam: “Your favor of yesterday at hand. I have an agreement with the counsel for the Village that there shall be a stay in the collection of your tax until the determination of the certiorari proceeding.” Griffin had effected a lower assessment to $60,000 and was hopeful of getting it reduced to $45,000, Sam’s purchase price [MTP].