November 10 Saturday – Sam wrote of playing billiards until 1:15 a.m.: “I got but poor sleep afterwards & was pretty tired next day. I stayed home at night [Nov. 10] & did not go to the Alden feed. Those who went to it did not reach their beds until 4 a.m.—Howells & Paine included—but Aldrich got here at 2 a.m.” [Nov. 13 to Jean].
Isabel Lyon’s journal:
T.B. Aldrich is so disappointing in appearance & in qualities of all kinds that go to make up the literary man bearing a high reputation.
“Just Aldrich thou, to thine our manner born, has thou touched aught that thou dids’t not adorn?”
I went into Mr. Clemens’s room this morning with the closing lines of a double sonnet to Aldrich at 70 & I was moved & happy by them, & glad do know that the man who could inspire that was in the house. Then pretty soon after the King read the poem aloud, Mr. A. came in. Pudgy he is, & short & red faced & mannerless & irritated because his trunk couldn’t go up to Boston on the same train with him. “Why in the deuce can’t it go up on the same train?” His gift of song seems turned into a worldly complaint, a worldly complaint like this. The students at Smith College “don’t belong to the swell set.” I’m stunned by the disappointment of it all. Such a sweet reverence I’ve had these many years & it was broadened by the beautiful tribute the King gave him in the dictation over in Florence. I wanted to sit & listen to the sweet wonderful flow of his speech & the most I heard was that he had lost his spectacles here in the house [MTP TS 145-146].
J. Adelphi Gottlieb for Volunteer Emergency Service Medical Corps, NYC wrote to inform Sam that he had been elected as “HONORARY MEMBER of the International Sanitary & Public Safety Commission; in recognition of the value of your suggestions for public welfare and the cause of humanity” [MTP].
On or after this date Sam replied to J. Adelphi Gottlieb. “I thank the committee for the Ex. Board of the Nat. Vol. Emergency Service very much for the compliment they have paid me in making me an honorary member of the Int. Sanitary & Public Safety Commission & I accept” [MTP].