December 16 Friday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Howells, who had been ill and unable to attend the Montreal dinner honoring Sam as planned.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,—It was a sharp disappointment—your inability to connect, on the Canadian raid. What a gaudy good time we should have had!

Disappointed, again, when I got back to Boston; for I was promising myself half an hour’s look at you, in Belmont; but your note to Osgood showed that that could not be allowed yet.

One of those drenching days last week, he [Twichell] slopped down town with his cubs, & visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat woman, & a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to. The giant had a broom, & was cleaning up & fixing around, diligently. Joe conceived the idea of getting some talk out of him. Now that never would have occurred to me. So he dropped in under the man’s elbow, dogged him patiently around, prodding him with questions & getting irritated snarls in return which would have finished me early—but at last one of Joe’s random shafts drove the centre of that giant’s sympathies somehow, & fetched him. The fountains of his great deep were broken up, & he rained a flood of personal history that was unspeakably entertaining.

And mind you Joe was able to come up here, days afterwards, & reproduce that giant’s picturesque & admirable history. But dern him, he can’t write it—which is all wrong, & not as it should be [MTHL 1: 380-1].

Sarah Pratt McLean Greene wrote from Salisbury, Conn. to thank Sam for his Dec. 12 letter, which gave her “more pleasure” than she cared to tell, and thanked him “in advance for the copy of your new book” [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Authoress of ‘Cape Cod Folks’”