June 21 Wednesday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Samuel J. Elder.

I have read your article with great interest—& also with great profit. I am glad to have it, & I thank you.

I was at the meeting you speak of, & offered & explained the two motions I went there to make —then hurried away. But they passed. One of them was the “life & 50 years” proposition.

Your letter has put a motion into my head: have some of the literary guild go to Washington in the fall, get the help of the President & John Hay, & ask Congress to pass a special act extending M . Hale’s copyrights to life & 50 years after?

The thing once done & concreted—with the sure applause of press & nation—it would come easy to Congress (finding the water not so cold as expected) to go ahead & make the plunge for all American authorship.

The log-rolling for M . Hale’s bill would be unlaborious. I stayed on the floor of the House (without having received the thanks of Congress), 3 hours once & polled both parties for the existing international law, and even that was no very hard work.

And then I got the thanks of Congress, besides—for going away. / Very Truly Yours [MTP]. Note: boxed in the right corner of the letter: “The above alludes to an article on copyright pub. In the Yale Law Mag.”

Isabel Lyon’s journal: Tonight Mr. Clemens read on in the microbe satire. It is strong, fearfully strong, touching on all the great events of the day and telling the truth about them too. It is so clever—and so scathing. After the reading when Mr. Clemens explained to Jean what a “Tiger” is in a cheer he went on to tell how 40 years ago the Chinamen in San Francisco (perhaps they do it now too) applauded by imitating a sky rocket and Mr. Clemens did it, he imitated with voice and upward sweep of his arm, the soaring flight—the vanishing and the bursting of the rocket. Because there is so much soul in him, perhaps, he puts it into what he does [MTP TS 67].

Bigelow wrote from Munich, Germany to Sam, “back at my Munich workshop pegging away at some more lectures for the winter of 1905/06.” He sent a picture of the Thistle “having had a most delightful spattering of salt water on board.” He gave travel plans for Panama, Porto Rico, and Boston by January for his lectures. He asked for Sam’s acceptance “on paper for the next ANNUAL DINNER of the ENDS of the EARTH on February 2 in New York” [MTP]. I: next to this last item, Sam wrote “as my guest” in pencil.