July 14 Tuesday – In Redding, Conn. Sam finished the mislaid July 5 letter to Dorothy Sturgis.

TEN DAYS LATER

It has long been my impression that this letter went to the mail at the time it was written. But that was a mistake. It got mislaid, & had turned up by accident this morning.

To-day is Tuesday. Can’t you come next Saturday, Dorothy, & give us a few days? I hope you can. Miss Marjorie Clinton, a highly valued friend of ours, will arrive at 6 that evening, & Ashcroft our favorite male friend will come by that or an earlier time. It isn’t a hard journey for you, you are so young. You leave Boston at 8 a.m. (there’s a Pullman card) & in 4 hours you reach South Norwalk. There you descend & cross under the tracks to take a train which is waiting and ready for you. It fetches you to Redding in half an hour, & Miss Lyon or I will be waiting for you there with a carriage. The drive is a half-hour, over a country road. Do come, dear—& telegraph or telephone us.

With lots of love— … [MTP].

In his A.D. Sam ridiculed Norman Hapgood’s editorial comments in the July 11 issue of Collier’s Weekly [Gribben 154]. He also scalded Theodore Roosevelt in this A.D. on the Brownsville incident. Gribben writes:

Mark Twain evidently depended on the manuscript of Paine’s book [Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger. A Story of Frontier Reform (1909)] in arraigning Theodore Roosevelt for mishandling the Brownsville incident (14 July 1908 AD, MTP). “By the testimony of Captain McDonald, Texas Ranger, a man whose character for veracity is well established…the government and its agents acted in a shabby and dishonest and dishonorable way from the beginning to the end” [522].

J.G. Hester wrote from Calgary, Canada to Sam, having delayed writing for 40 years after once meeting him on a train during Clemens’ first trip to England, but not knowing who he was [MTP].

George H. Teague wrote from London to Sam,who had given him an autograph the previous year. Teague asked for “a few lines” for his new magazine “The White,” shortly to be published in London [MTP].