August 12 Thursday – The first date showing Sam living in Buffalo. Sam replied from Buffalo to Elisha Bliss’ of July 30.
Your splendid letter has arrived, & I confess I owe you one. I was in an awful sweat when I wrote you, for everything seemed going wrong end foremost with me. I had just got mad with the Cleveland Herald folks & broken off all further negotiations for a purchase, & so I let you & some others have the benefit of my ill nature. But that is all gone by, & now we will smoke the pipe of peace & bury the hatchet. … He then related buying a third interest in the Buffalo Express, and seeing the finished book the day before in Elmira. “It is the very handsomest book of the season & you ought to be proud of your work. It will sell” [MTL 3: 292].
Reigstad gives Mrs. J.C. Randall’s boarding house at 39 East Swan Street as Sam’s living quarters for his last bachelor days (Aug-Sept) in Buffalo, writing “Her fashionable boarding house attracted lodgers a cut above the usual class of laborers and tug men.” Also: On his first night there [Aug. 12?], Mrs. Randall formally presented Twain to some of the other guests, including Major and Mrs. James Dickie, who saluted and curtsied, respectively;  William E. Foster, managing editor of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser; Mrs. Kitty Blanchard, a widow; Blanchard’s young son, Arthur; and George Brewster Matthews, a twenty-one-year-old bookkeeper with L. Enos and Company [81]. Note: editorial emphasis.