October 24 Saturday – In Hartford Sam wrote two letters to William Dean Howells. The men were developing a playful and intimate association through letters and mutual admiration. In the first letter Sam repeated that he’d hoped to write something for Howells’ January edition of the Atlantic, (as requested in Howells’ Sept. 30 letter) but that the “state of weary & endless confusion” (the house still being finished all around them) proved that his “head won’t ‘go’.” In the second letter, two hours later, Sam had a thunderbolt of an idea, which came to him on a walk with Joe Twichell.

…I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilot house. He said “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” I hadn’t thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run through 3 months or 6 or 9? ——or about 4 months, say? [MTL 6: 262-3].

What came from this idea?—“Old Times on the Mississippi” in seven installments in the Atlantic, Jan. through June and Aug. 1875, later to become Life on the Mississippi (1883).

G.W. Rogers sent a receipt for £21 from London [MTP].