July 3 Friday – In Redding, Conn. Sam wrote to John M. Howells, who had designed Sam’s new home in Redding.

Dear John: / You have set up a charming Italian villa here & made it look native & at home among these Yankee woods & hills. It is a fine feat. It is a shapely & stately & handsome house, & grows more & more impressive & satisfying and beautiful the more I enlarge my acquaintance with it. I am speaking of its outside. Inside it is sane,—a compliment which cannot be applied to any other Italian villa, I suppose. The distribution of the rooms is rational, no space is wasted, all space is profitably utilized. It has four times as much useful & usable room in it as was findable in that East Florentine villa of ours, although that one was 200 feet long, 60 feet wide, 3 stories high, and & had a cellar under the whole silly mess. You couldn’t even get to one bedroom without passing through somebody else’s; & it had only 3 good bedrooms in it.

All of our visitors are as delighted with the house as I am. Go on, John. Introduce the American-Italian villa, & spread it over the land. It is the ideal house, the ideal home. / Affectionately … [MTP].

Sam’s A.D. for this date dealt with “spectacular venon” (Hill 209) against Lillian Aldrich for the June 30 Memorial of her late husband, which Sam attended. See June 30 entry.  

Ebenezer J. Hill, Congressman on the Committee on Ways and Means, wrote to Sam. “I am in receipt of a communication from the Post Office Department under date of June 30th stating that Rural Route No. 41 will be extended so as to serve you at your residence…effective from and after July 15, 1908” [MTP].

N.J. Lee for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad wrote to Sam, repeating the July 2 from A.B. Smith of the railroad and advising the #232 would begin stopping at Redding on July 6 [MTP].

George M. Robinson wrote from NYC to Sam about Clara’s fall and winter tour; he also had a photo of Clara and Miss Marie Nichols to deliver to Clemens and “give him a detailed account of our trip to London” [MTP]. Note: Robinson was Clara’s tour manager.