August 23 Tuesday – Sam wrote a short note from Elmira to Charles Webster, saying he was returning the “tile patterns….They do not happen to be the right ones.” Wasn’t there a “great bound book—a multitude of designs to select from”? [MTP].

Sam also telegrammed & wrote to Charles Eliot Norton that he had “finished loading myself up with my speech” and had “ordered a sleeping-section for Albany in to-night’s train.” However, bad news about Garfield’s condition caused Sam to cancel the trip and speech at Ashfield, because he shuddered at the thought of his humorous talk appearing in newspapers full of “black bars of mourning” [MTHL 1: 367n2]. Sam did leave on his business trip to Hartford and Boston, however, as planned. The telegram is not extant but referred to in Norton’s reply of Aug. 24.

Sam also wrote to James R. Osgood who had just returned home from abroad. After welcoming him back, Sam got to the point about chapters six and seven in P&P:

“I don’t want to see any more until this godamed idiotic punctuating & capitalizing has been swept away & my own restored. I didn’t see this chapter until I had already read Chap. VII—which latter mess of God-forever-God damned lunacy has turned my hair white with rage. Sweetly, sweetly / Yours/ Mark” [MTP].

Sam left Elmira in the evening, spent some time on the train with John Slee (Jervis Langdon’s old business manager), and slept in the cars [Aug. 25 & 30 letters to Livy, Norton]