June 22 Thursday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Howells. After reading the July installment of Howells’ A Modern Instance in the Century Magazine, Sam gushed:

I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over…your story. It’s perfectly dazzling—it’s masterly—incomparable. Yet I heard you read it—without losing my balance. Well, the difference between your reading & your writing is—remarkable—I mean, in the effects produced & the impressions left behind. Why, the one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell’s booming yarns repeated by a somnambulist.

Sam added in the evening that “Susie is stricken—& savagely—with this dire scarlet fever” [MTHL 1: 407-8]. (Her ailment turned out to be something less serious.)