October 19 Saturday – Sam’s notebook: “I go up Hudson by boat from Yonkers at 9.45” [NB 44 TS 15].

In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote to Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851-1926), youngest daughter of the famous author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I wish I were not so hard-driven: then nothing could give me more contentment than to try to write something worth printing in your periodical, “Christ’s Poor”; indeed you pay me a compliment which I highly value when you invite me to do it, as holding me not unworthy to appear in its pages. But if I cannot write I can at least try to help in other ways, & I shall do that, for among the needs of your noble charity is money, & I know some people who have it & who have not been reluctant to spend it in good causes. And certainly if there is an unassailably good cause in the world it is this one undertaken by the Dominican Sisters of housing, nourishing & nursing the pathetically unfortunate of all the afflicted among us—men & women sentenced to a painful & lingering death by incurable disease [MTP: Cyril Clemens, Mark Twain: The Letter Writer, 1932].

Note: Lathop gave up a lucrative litrary career and dedicated herself to caring for those poor with incurable cancer. With Alice Huber, Lathrop established The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer in Dec. 1900, later known as the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, Westchester County. Their work grew and moved several times. Lathrop published the magazine, Christ’s Poor 1901-1904. Her husband, George Parsons Lathrop, died in 1898 (see Mar. 31, 1887 entry).

On this day (or the same in 1902) Sam wrote a letter to an unidentified publisher: “…your printers need watching; they take some very large liberties with my spelling and punctuation,” etc. [MTP: Anderson Auction Co. catalogs Feb. 5, Item 90]. Note: This seems to line up well with the Oct. 20 to Joseph Johnson, Jr. Further, Sam was contracted at this time to write only for Harpers, but political tracts may have been exempted. The MTP catalogs as either this day or the same in 1902.

Harper’s Weekly published Mark Twain’s Oct. 17 speech for the Order of Acorns [MTHL 2: 731n1]. It also ran James McAurthur’s brief account on the dramatization of TS by Paul Kester, p.1058 [Tenney 35; Tenney: “A Reference Guide Seventh Annual Supplement,” American Literary Realism, Autumn 1983 p. 168-9].