April 25 Sunday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Jane Clemens  and sister Pamela Moffett. Sam had received the announcement from his niece, Annie Moffett of an engagement to Charles Webster. Sam had also received a letter from his mother urging him to encourage Orion.

I can’t “encourage” Orion. Nobody can do that, conscientiously, for the reason that before one’s letter has time to reach him he is off on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a man who, the older he grows the worse he writes? Would you encourage Orion in the glaring insanity of studying law? If he were packed & crammed full of law, it would be worthless lumber to him, for his is such a capricious & ill-regulated mind that he would apply the principles of the law with no more judgment than a child of ten years. I know what I am saying. I laid one of the plainest & simplest of legal questions before Orion once, & the helpless & hopeless mess he made of it was absolutely astonishing. Nothing aggravates me so much as to have Orion mention law or literature.

Sam also wrote that Livy had diphtheria but was well again, and that the “Bay” (Clara) had one tooth, and that Susy was “hoarse a good part of the time—but the sooner she gets used to it the sooner she will like it” [MTL 6: 459-61].

April 25 or 26 Monday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Howells, who had written about an ex riverboat pilot, William Lyman Fawcett’s article, “The Pillars of Hercules” in the Atlantic Monthly for Jan. 1874.

“Good for Fawcett! …All the boys [riverboat pilots] had brains, & plenty of them—but they mostly lacked education & the literary faculty” [MTL 6: 463].