April 7 Friday – Sam’s second letter to the Courant editor:

Your Niles street correspondent of yesterday gave you but a part of our calamities. The losses of life & limb & of property, by the sinking of Niles street, & the subsequent drownings in the canal that has taken its place, in whose now placid waters school children sail back & forth with plumb & line, trying in vain to sound its depths, are only equal to the destruction of human life that is going on there from another source. On the north side of the street, in a lot donated by a deceased friend to one of our religious societies, is a lake, beautiful to behold—to the passer by—but its waters—why the Dead sea is nothing to it. A horse stable on one side of it furnishes a part of the material that goes to make up the death-dealing odors that exhale from it, & that with a liberality characteristic of all religious institutions, are distributed gratuitously to the nostrils of those that live near by. Moreover, the water itself is also generously furnished to the nearest neighbors, being supplied to them in their very cellars, where morning, noon & night they can enjoy the luxury of a foot-bath as they go to & return from their furnaces, or go after coal. You will not be surprised then to learn that for every death occasioned, as you were told, by the collapse of the street, another has occurred from excessive indulgence either in the bath or in exhaling the vapors from the lake, nor that the physicians in this part of the town, worn out with constant labors to keep alive the few that remain in the street, are now collapsing themselves. One of two things is therefore inevitable—either we must have less of the lake or a new supply of physicians. And will you, as our strength is failing & we cannot go out to hunt them up, say this to the health commissioners. / A Sufferer.

“Laugh” wrote from Branford, Conn. to praise Mark Twain books but to ask “why have you given up the Lecturing Field. You have never I think given Canadians a chance to see & hear you” [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env. “Anonymous”