October 17 Saturday – At the Grosvenor Hotel in N.Y.C. Sam wrote to Muriel M. Pears.
It isn’t that I have forgotten, but that I have been carrying so many fatiguing & annoying (business) perplexities these 4 months that I was not fitted to think, speak or write about anything else. I am not sure that the load is at last unstrapped & will tumble off three days hence or four, but I am confident of it. If I wasn’t, I couldn’t be trying to write a letter.
A month ago a Philadelphia periodical sent a photographer to the farm, & he & I had a pleasant hour or two & he took a lot of pictures, & when the proofs came the family were delighted with them (generally they ain’t.) So I selected a specimen & ordered a copy of it to be sent to you—to remind you that I wasn’t forgetting. But I find, now, that it takes so much time & red tape to effectively copyright such things, that my reminder failed of its office & probably hasn’t started until about now; I judge so because the number which we ordered from the various negatives reached us only yesterday.
I think there is an old darkey in the one you will receive. He has been in the family’s service 40 years— originally as coachman. About 27 years ago, by an exertion of very extraordinary strength, courage & quick judgment he saved from death my wife’s young sister-in-law & her little girl—the little girl has been a wife a year, now & was here yesterday. (All this to explain why John T. Lewis & I are so companionable, & make the picture pleasing to you instead of unpleasing.)
By compulsion of the doctors we go to Italy for a year, to find a mild climate for Mrs. Clemens, who is now able to walk several steps—about 6—without assistance. It has taken 7½ months of writing & cabling, to get the kind of house we want, & we got it only 4 days ago—by cable. We don’t know whether it is big enough, nor anything about it except that it is (apparently) between Fiesole & Sattiguano. But no matter, we sail for Genoa 7 days hence, all the same. We are 7—& none of us in heaven; nor likely to be, I guess, though such details do not interest me, but it is a 13,000-ton ship & there’ll be only 13 passengers besides ourselves, therefore there will be opportunity for much comfort.
Lest I forget—oh, listen! This from the letter of a friend uptown—it has just arrived:
‘I would be almost ashamed to read you Kipling’s letter, in which he refers to you, since he puts it so strongly—probably it is better to write it: “I love to think of the great & godlike Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, & don’t you forget it.Cervantes was a relation of his.”’
You will think that I manufactured that just & handsome testimony, but I give you my word I didn’t. And you will think K’s statement is not true, but I give you my word it is [MTP].
Note: the photographer referred to, Thomas E. Marr, was from Boston. Here Sam designates an unspecified “Philadelphia periodical” (Ladies’ Home Journal) as sending Marr; other sources name Harper’s (see Nov. 1903). Katy Leary and nurse Margaret Sherry accompanied the family to Italy. Isabel Lyon, the seventh member of the party, sailed later, accompanied by her mother, arriving in the Lahn about Nov. 22 or 23.
About this day Sam also forwarded Henry C. Griffin’s Oct. 15 letter to Katharine I. Harrison, adding a note at the bottom: “Here’s some more, Miss Harrison / SLC / I wrote him some days ago that Hoyt & Co were in charge” [MTP].