May 18 Tuesday – Sam and Joe Twichell were on the way to a baseball game between the “Hartfords” and the “Bostons” (Hartford Dark Blues and the Boston Red Stockings) when they met Elisha Bliss and Bret Harte on their way to look at a house for Harte to rent [MTL 6: 483n3]. At the baseball game, Sam’s umbrella was stolen, leading him to write an announcement to the Hartford Courant that “a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA.” Sam offered a reward of $5 for the return of the umbrella and added, “I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains.” The notice was reprinted in the New York World, and paraphrased in Harper’s Weekly for June 19. A rumor even went around that someone had left a dead boy on Sam’s property [MTL 6: 481-2]. Sam may have been further irritated that Boston won the game, 10-5. Other events of the day are noted in Twichell’s journal:

Attended the theological anniversary at New Haven. M.T. went down with me and I spent considerable time (about the whole afternoon, in fact) with him. First we went carriage shopping and then to Prof. Marsh’s museum where he showed us bones and talked evolution as long as we could stay. ‘Twas very entertaining indeed. / Returning home by the midnight train I fell in with Elisha Bliss, who gave me a full and funny account of all he had suffered, as publisher from Bret Harte in the process of getting out of him a book he had contracted to write [Yale, copy at MTP].