June 30 Friday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Hamlin Garland.

Yesterday I took a day off from work—the first in 39 consecutive days—& burned 30,000 words, & am now taking a fresh start for another long siege (with 4,000 words to my credit to- day); but I put in yesterday’s holiday & up to 2 this morning reading your book—criminal dissipation for a laboring man & slow reader, & I knew I ought to follow my rule & go to sleep at 11, but I was caught with the last third unread, & had to go on to the end, it was so enthralling. I like that book exceedingly, & some day when I get another holiday I will write another word about it, but not now. I must save fuel for to morrow [MTP]. Note: Sam was working on the unfinished “3,000 Years Among the Microbes.” Gribben identifies Garland’s book as The Tyranny of the Dark (1905) [252].

Sam also wrote to Frank J. Firth, the letter not extant but referred to in Firth’s reply to Isabel Lyon of July 6.

Isabel Lyon’s journal: Oh, I have been steeped and steeped and steeped with joy over a manuscript that Mr. Clemens brought down stairs for me to read, “when I had leisure.” Leisure? You’d boil it out of midnight if you couldn’t find it anywhere else. It’s “The Mysterious Stranger,” and oh the mystery and charm of him, and the beauty and humor and impossibility, and English of the rest of it. All unequalled. Too much delight for one week. The Apostrophe to Death. Seeing Mr. Faulkner. Mr. Howell’s last book. Seeing Colonel Higginson. And now this crown of crowns, this wonderful unfinished story [MTP TS 71].

Tuckey notes Clemens put this date on the margin of the “Print Shop” holograph, and writes:

…June 30, 1905, he had reread his unfinished “Print Shop” story, for which he had already written the chapter that would immortalize the conscious ‘I’ of the narrator, and was carrying it forward toward that planned conclusion. He did not quite bring the story through to that point, however, for he put it aside about July 12, after Frederick A. Duneka of Harper & Brothers had visited him to see whether he could provide something for next winter’s book trade [“The ‘Me’ and the Machine” 136]. Note: Hill gives Duneka’s arrival as July 10 [111]. Hill gives this date for Isabel Lyon (who was becoming his testing reader) reading what Sam completed on The Mysterious Stranger. He would continue working on it as No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger into July [111].