December 31 Tuesday – Sam’s notebook: “The Players—Midnight Speech. Joe Jefferson to introduce me & flatter the Club, I to respond & refute” [NB 44 TS 19].

In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote to Chester Sanders Lord for the Lotos Club.

I wish I could be there & help the Lotos do honor to the man whose work & fame have done so much to honor America; but I am spending that evening with the Woman’s University Club. I should dearly like to be there & make love to Abbey—which is the habit of all his friends—& let him hug to his heart once more his old ass, whom he once invited to the Royal Academy Banquet, & who didn’t know enough to—to—

But never mind—I shall know better another time, if it comes. It was a distinction, to be the only man that had ever done it; but there are distinctions which do not distinc satisfactorily when you come to think them over at your leisure [MTP].

Note: The Lotos dinner in honor of Edwin A. Abbey was on Jan. 18, 1902 (see NY Times article Jan. 19 on the banquet). Sam did not attend, and it is assumed he did go to the Woman’s University Club affair on that evening, though no talk is listed in Fatout or other secondary sources. See Nov. 5 or 12 entry, 1900.

Harper & Brothers sent Sam a statement dated Dec. 31, 1901 showing $3,029.43 in royalties due and payable on May 1, 1902. Sam wrote on the statement, “No return yet from the sets. Why is this?” [1901 Financials file MTP].

Elisabeth Marbury wrote to Sam enclosing a check of $451.45, which was Sam’s 20% share on the PW play from Apr. 20 1901 to week ending Dec. 14, 1901, less her commission [MTP].

Mary C. Trask wrote from N.Y.C. for the Alumnae of Vassar College to Sam about his reading there on Feb. 8, 1902, and that he might “appear in any character…religious, political, social, or… elocutionary”[MTP].

Joe Twichell wrote to Sam.

The Hartford Yale Alumni Association will banquet at the Allyn House Friday evening, Jan. 31, 1902. The Committee of arrangements—you know the rest. Well, for my part, I do very much wish you would come. We want as Hartford men to congratulate as a Hartford man, and ourselves in your presence, on the Bi-Centennial honor with which you were lauded in October—which is our honor also…. I will meet you in New Haven Thursday Jan. 30th and we will sup and ring with them that night and come up to Hartford together the next day—to our house of course [MTP].

At midnight Sam gave a speech at Founder’s Night, The Players Club. Sam’s Dec. 30 to Aldrich shows that he had agreed to stand in for Joe Jefferson for the speech. See entry. The substance of his remarks is not known, but this is the night he first met his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, who gives an account of that first meeting in MTB p.1257-8.