August 17 Thursday – In Norfolk, Conn. Sam started a letter marked Private to Joe Twichell that he finished on Feb. 19:
Dear Joe: / Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker is fully as remarkable to-day as ever she was in her life. She dragged her 83 years up those steep stairs this morning –with a mission, need I say?— & sat by my bed an hour, & talked with all her old brightness, & deep earnestness, & passion for easing the sorrows & enlarging the happiness of the children of men. Her mission was to put me in the way of learning what spiritualism really is, in the hope that I might come to believe in it & then use my reputation in its service. Joe (this is the privacy) she has for 15 years had spiritual communication with a miscarriage in heaven! (I have never come nearer to smiling in my life & escaped.) The miscarriage has a name—the name its parents had intended to call it by had not miscarried. In heaven it has borne that name for 30 years. It knows English & talks it fluently, & takes as much interest in Nook Farm affairs as any miscarriage that ever lived. I wish I could see it with its halo on.
Do you remember that astonishing remark she made to you in 1873 in possible extenuation & abridgement & modification of Henry Ward’s alleged commerce with Mrs. Tilton? Well, this new outbreak is a close second to that one, it seems to me.
I am not a spiritualist yet. Still, she isn’t done with me—other evidences are to follow [MTP: Cushman file].
John Larkin, attorney, wrote to Sam that James Renwick had telephoned and the heating system for 21 Fifth Avenue had been completed. Larkin directed Sam to send Renwick (the owner) a check for the rent due [MTP]. Note: on Aug. 20 and 21 Sam gave instructions to Isabel Lyon about the payment due.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “To be thinking of people is really to be associating with them. Thinking and thinking of the hours that I shall perhaps spend with Santissima [Clara] next winter, I have the thought of her, revived, and ready for other people less beautiful” [MTP TS 89].
Roi Cooper Megrue for Elisabeth Marbury wrote to Sam: “I have given Mr. [M. Worth] Colwell permission to dramatize” CY “on the understanding that if he does not sell the play within a year the rights revert to Mr. Clemens” [MTP].
Dear Joe: / Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker is fully as remarkable to-day as ever she was in her life. She dragged her 83 years up those steep stairs this morning –with a mission, need I say?— & sat by my bed an hour, & talked with all her old brightness, & deep earnestness, & passion for easing the sorrows & enlarging the happiness of the children of men. Her mission was to put me in the way of learning what spiritualism really is, in the hope that I might come to believe in it & then use my reputation in its service. Joe (this is the privacy) she has for 15 years had spiritual communication with a miscarriage in heaven! (I have never come nearer to smiling in my life & escaped.) The miscarriage has a name—the name its parents had intended to call it by had not miscarried. In heaven it has borne that name for 30 years. It knows English & talks it fluently, & takes as much interest in Nook Farm affairs as any miscarriage that ever lived. I wish I could see it with its halo on.
Do you remember that astonishing remark she made to you in 1873 in possible extenuation & abridgement & modification of Henry Ward’s alleged commerce with Mrs. Tilton? Well, this new outbreak is a close second to that one, it seems to me.
I am not a spiritualist yet. Still, she isn’t done with me—other evidences are to follow [MTP: Cushman file].
John Larkin, attorney, wrote to Sam that James Renwick had telephoned and the heating system for 21 Fifth Avenue had been completed. Larkin directed Sam to send Renwick (the owner) a check for the rent due [MTP]. Note: on Aug. 20 and 21 Sam gave instructions to Isabel Lyon about the payment due.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “To be thinking of people is really to be associating with them. Thinking and thinking of the hours that I shall perhaps spend with Santissima [Clara] next winter, I have the thought of her, revived, and ready for other people less beautiful” [MTP TS 89].
Roi Cooper Megrue for Elisabeth Marbury wrote to Sam: “I have given Mr. [M. Worth] Colwell permission to dramatize” CY “on the understanding that if he does not sell the play within a year the rights revert to Mr. Clemens” [MTP].
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