September 27 Wednesday – In Hartford Sam wrote to John and Alice Hooker Day that he and Livy would be happy to see them on “Friday evening from 7 till 11” [MTLE 1: 119]. Note: Sam & Livy had attended the 1869 Hooker-Day wedding in New York. This note from MTPO:

“This invitation to the Days is the only one known to survive of those sent to an undetermined number of Hartford friends. Susan Warner, wife of Charles Dudley Warner, helped Olivia Clemens write some of the others. Another neighbor, Lilly Warner, informed her husband, George, who was away on business, that the occasion was the Clemenses’ ‘big long talked of party’ and that it ‘went off well.’ Unable to attend herself, she went over beforehand on Friday, 29 September, ‘to see the house’ and the following day described the decorations: ‘No hot-house flowers—except on the sup. table (billiard room.) but wreaths & masses of wild things—clematis maple branches—golden rod— It was a dream of delight’ (Lilly Warner to George Warner, 26 Sept 76, 30 Sept 76, both in CU-MARK).”

Sam also wrote to James B. Pond (1838-1903), who had bought out James Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau the year before. Evidently Sam had agreed to lecture in unspecified “southern engagements,” and had asked his attorney (Perkins) to “work & buy a compromise” out of them. Sam wanted Pond to gain him a release from the engagements if the compromise failed [MTLE 1: 120]. Notes with MTPO state that Perkins advised Sam to exclude this part of the East due to “legal entanglements with an old Baltimore adversary” (Henry C. Lockwood over that old vest-strap patent dispute).