March 16 Tuesday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Howells, responding to William’s Mar. 15 note of thanks for the visit. Sam related Livy’s remark that “Nothing could have been added to that visit to make it more charming, except days.”
Sam discovered that baby Clara’s wet nurse, Maria McLaughlin (her fifth and last), had raided his beer closet and “drank 200 bottles of the 252…. My beer will be respected,” Sam wrote, “now, I hope, for I do not wish to resort to bloodshed.” In later years Sam described Maria McLaughlin with his muscular pen:
No. 5 was apparently Irish, with a powerful strain of Egyptian in her….She stood six feet in her stockings, she was perfect in form & contour, raven-haired, dark as an Indian, stately, carrying her head like an empress, she had the martial port & stride of a grenadier, & the pluck & strength of a battalion of them. In professional capacity the cow was a poor thing compared to her, & not even the pump was qualified to take on airs where she was. She was as independent as the flag, she was indifferent to morals & principles, she disdained company, & marched in a procession by herself. She was as healthy as iron, she had the appetite of a crocodile, the stomach of a cellar, & the digestion of a quartz-mill. Scorning the adamantine law that a wet-nurse must partake of delicate things only, she devoured anything & everything she could get her hands on, shoveling into her person fiendish combinations of fresh pork, lemon pie, boiled cabbage, ice cream, green apples, pickled tripe, raw turnips, & washing the cargo down with freshets of coffee, tea, brandy, whisky, turpentine, kerosene—anything that was liquid; she smoked pipes, cigars, cigarettes, she whooped like a Pawnee & swore like a demon; & then she would go up stairs loaded as described & perfectly delight the baby with a boquet which ought to have killed it at thirty yards, but which only made it happy & fat & contented & boozy. No child but this one ever had such grand & wholesome service. The giantess raided my tobacco & cigar department every day; no drinkable thing was safe from her if you turned your back a moment [MTL 6: 415-6n6].