September 30 Sunday – Isabel Lyon’s journal:

AB came out this morning & packed the 2 ms. trunks for me. I’m weak these days—very weak —& Dr. Stowell says I must go away. I don’t see how it is possible. We had a fire in my room and we spent most of the afternoon there, AB staying to luncheon & going on with the packing in the afternoon. I was very tired; tired from yesterday’s battle with Jean; tired from packing today—so I curled up on the couch & AB walked up & down the room, smoking cigarettes & talking about the King & the Biography and he truly says that the King’s life is divided into periods & he rehearsed them to me. AB has a walk so purposeful, too purposeful, so individual, that it is a great satisfaction to me to watch his long stride. Each step counts, & counts for a definite progress. There is nothing wasteful about him [MTP TS 124-125].

Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote from Ponkapog, Mass. to Sam.

Dear Mark: / Letters and long-distance telephones are requesting me to be “brilliant”. My immediate neighbors make no such demand; they know better. They cynically inquire after my opalescence and wonder how on earth I got these “rose-diamonds” through the custom-house unbeknown to any body. You have about ruined me—as you probably intended to do—by that paragraph in the last number of the N. A. Review. A few more paragraphs of that kind will oblige me to retire from the world. I shall retire into a nunnery. I think that would suit me in my old-age. It would have suited me at any period of my life. Meanwhile I want the rest of that delightful autobiography, and I don’t want it on the instalment plan; I want it now. I can’t wait for your convenience. Are you still at Dublin? Shall you come this way—meaning Boston— with your nightingale? We desire hungrily to hear her and see you, who are always dear to us. We purpose to move to Mt. Vernon street in the latter part of October. At present we are sojourning in Ponkapog, where our boy and his bran-new wife are spending a few weeks with us preparatory to taking up their own housekeeping in The Cambridge on Beacon street. The young couple are looking at existence through rose-colored spectacles—just as we did long ago, before we ever dreamed of any other kind of glasses. It is pleasant to watch the kids. They are—to use the language of Rozvelt’s favorite poet—

“2 soles with but a single thot,

2 harts that beet az 1.”—

Faithfully yours here and hereafter, unless we all are a limited corporation, T. B. A. [MTP].

September 30 ca. – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote on Aldrich’s Sept. 30 to Mary B. Rogers.

Mary, I’m sending you this to show you that there are people who want my admirable biography now. It’s butter, my pal! Although I can’t furnish it to him I can unload a chapter onto you now & then, & I mean to do it. And you must read it, & say you like it, whether you do or not. I will go to his Boston house for a few days by & by, & very willingly, but not to his Ponkapog house any more [MTP].