August 12 Friday – Sam wrote twice from Elmira to Charles Webster. The longest letter asked him to negotiate with the remodelers William & Robert Garvie and James Ahern on work in progress at the Farmington Avenue house, principally a remodel of the kitchen. Sam gave quite a long laundry list of things to check, recheck, prove and consider.
“Scan that mason’s bill sharply, for that mason is an infernal thief, I’m afraid. He is a prominent politician” [MTBus 163-5].
The second letter only survives partially, and directs Webster to “Make any contract you please” with “the French gentleman…the tighter the better…” Sam wanted to “limit his ownership of the”—and this is where the fragment ends [MTP]. Who was the “French gentleman”? What did he own?
Sam also wrote to Howells:
“Say— I am going to Ashfield, Mass. Aug 25th. Tell me—what does a body have to do there? Talk? And if so, who are the audience? 1. Is it a school? 2. If so, is it male, or female, or both? 3. Boys & girls? or bigger bucks & fillies? Are you going? In a hurry, Yrs Ever Mark” [MTHL 1: 364]. Note: “In 1879 Charles Eliot Norton had begun sponsoring an annual midsummer Academy Dinner at Ashfield, Mass., where he had long maintained his summer home. Each year Norton invited some celebrated friend or acquaintance to speak…” [364n1].
Sam also wrote to Franklin Whitmore. After relating illnesses just past for baby Jean and himself, plus a “crick in the neck” for Livy, the sale of their old carriage for $300 and his disregard of advice to buy more stock in Oregon & Transcontinental, Sam boasted that he’d been “playing many games of billiards with former antagonists of mine—took them into camp, every one.” Sam, the cat lover, also told of losing and then finding a “splendid cat”:
That cat of ours went down to town—3 miles, through the woods, in the night,—& attended a colored-people’s church-festival where she didn’t even know the deacons—was gone 48 hours, & marched home again this morning. Now think of that! That cat is not for sale. Talented cat. Religious cat…and no color-prejudices, either [MTP].