March 15 Wednesday – Hartford schoolteacher, Roswell H. Phelps, visited Sam to apply for stenographer on the upcoming trip to the Mississippi. Negotiations for salary took place. Phelps may have shown Sam some fundamentals of shorthand, because there are several practice pages of shorthand from this period in Sam’s notebook [MTNJ 2: 453n59].

In Boston, Howells wrote Sam:

Thanks and thanks for all your kindness in my father’s affair….Now what can I do to show my sense of Grant’s kindness? Would it be too hard on him if I sent him two of my books…? What a bare-faced pretence is that bill of $6.85! You have got on such a string of misrepresentations in regards to your mother’s visit that you can’t tell the truth about anything. Why, the breakfast bacon that I ate alone [was] worth $6.85….You can’t think what a sneaking desire I had to get into the carriage, that day, and drive home with you and Mrs. Clemens. Note: Howells and Sam had returned home on the same train; Livy met Sam at the Hartford station; probably Mar. 11.

James R. Osgood wrote to Sam, giving a list of Sam’s sketches published in the Atlantic, enough for a book of 250 to 300 pages. “When shall we publish and on what terms?” [MTP].