November 14 Wednesday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: “Ill on this day” [MTP TS 146].

Fanny Flint Conradson wrote from Franklin, Pa. to Sam. She, like many others, had read in the NY Herald of his bronchitis. She was a lifelong fan of his books since IA. Now she was a “twisted cripple” but owed much to his books for lightening her load.

…my narrowed life basks in sunshine caught in book leaves, when house-bound during winter, and how intimate I feel with my pleasure-giving writers, you the peer of all. Long ago, when your Hartford home was building, the finishing touches only lacking [1874], a mutual friend of yours and mine took me over it. When I saw the double doors of glass between your study and the children’s playroom, the father’s heart was as transparent as those doors [MTP].

Harriet Whitmore Enders wrote to Sam that the members of the Saturday Morning Club deeply regretted his inability to join them for their anniversary luncheon. They wished she would write for them and “express their exceeding regret…” and sent three badges which were “in the place of honor—I send them with the sincere hope from us all that you may be much stronger by this time…”  [MTP].

E.E. Helt, superintendent of Vermillion Co. Schools, Clinton, Ind. wrote to Sam hoping his bronchitis was over, and that they were reading his Autobiography in the NAR. He obliquely asked for “a little answer” [MTP].

Katharine Lampton Paxson wrote from Graham, Tex. to Sam after reading his Autobiography in the NAR. “I must protest against your heralding abroad as fact the exaggerated scene of the raw turnips. It’s a moral impossibility for such a thing ever to have taken place in my father’s house.” She claimed that exaggeration was a trait of the Lampton family, and that Sam had the trait “as high a degree as Papa did” [MTP].