November 17 Monday – Sam arrived home at 2:30 A.M. Later in the day he wrote from Hartford to Howells. He hadn’t had much sleep in Chicago and somehow didn’t feel tired, but knew fatigue would come. He waxed eloquent about the Chicago event and especially Robert Green Ingersoll’s speech. “…none but the master can make them get up on their feet,” Sam wrote of Ingersoll, a freethinker whose public pronouncements were close to Sam’s private ones. Sam wrote of Grant’s breaking down with laughter at Sam’s speech, and of the men rising to their feet to sing “Marching through Georgia” with tears streaming down their faces. It was “grand times” Sam reflected. The proofs of his book were stacked up and he wanted to delay a visit so he might make headway on them. He thought at this point that the work he faced would “bar him out of the Holmes breakfast & my visit” to Howells (Dec. 3) [MTLE 4: 146].