September 20 Sunday – In Hartford Sam replied to the Sept. 17 of William Dean Howells, who wrote, “This little story delights me more and more: I wish you had about forty of ‘em!” [MTHL 1:25]. Sam then asked him to send the proofs to “A True Story” to Hartford (they’d been sent to Elmira) so he might revise especially the “negro talk,”—“I amend dialect stuff by talking & talking it til lit sounds right….” Sam also mentioned the new house and that the Warners were shortly going “to the devil for a year,” by which he meant travel. Sam also told Howells to thank Aldrich for digging up more Langdon ancestors of Livy’s in a piece he’d written about Portsmouth, New Hampshire [MTL 6: 233-4].

Sam also wrote another letter to his “dear cousin,” Emma Parish. He talked of the house being full of workmen and the hammering hardly stopping and of taking “up quarters on the second story, sleeping in a guest room, eating in a nursery & using my study for a parlor.” Sam sent a picture of Susy and could not find one of Livy, the “luggage is still in such confusion” [MTL 6: 237].