July 20 Friday – In Elmira, Sam wrote  to Joe Twichell, telling more about the pegs-in-the-driveway memory game. Twichell indiscreetly allowed the letter to appear in the Hartford Courant for July 24, much to Sam’s consternation. To compound the error, the letter was printed with two errors [MTNJ 3: 28n47]. It also ran in the July 26 edition of the New York Times, p 3.

Sam also wrote to Howells, who wrote July 10 en route home on the SS Parisian, and was now back in Boston. Howells’ letter was mostly an account of a visit in Paris with the Gerhardts (see MTHL 1: 433-4).

We are desperately glad you & your gang are home again—may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow. Charley Clark has gone to the other side for a run—will be back in August. He had been sick, & needed the trip very much.

Mrs. Clemens had a lot & wasting spell of sickness last spring, & is still proportioned like the tongs, but she is pulling up, now, & by & by will get some cushions on her, I reckon. I hope so, anyway—it’s been like sleeping with a bed full of baskets. The children are booming, & my health is ridiculous, it’s so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports.

I haven’t piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm three weeks & a half ago. Why, it’s like old times, to step straight into the study, damp from the breakfast table, & sail right in & sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words. I wrote 4000 words to-day & I touch 3000 & upwards pretty often, & don’t fall below 2600 on any working day. And when I get fagged out, I lie abed a couple of days & read & smoke, & then go it again for 6 or 7 days. I have finished one small book [probably “1002d Arabian Night” which Howells didn’t care for] & am away along in a big one [HF] that I half-finished two or three years ago. I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more. It’s a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer [MTHL 1: 435].

Sam also related the creation of the memory game with the driveway pegs. The family planned to stay in Elmira “till Sept. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck [near Branford, Conn.] for some sea air. Then home.”

A fragment of a letter exists that Sam sent about this date to the Gerhardts:

“Jean is just over a solid attack of diptheria, & is all right again. Mrs. Clemens is fleshing up steadily—is as fat as the tongs, now” [MTP].

Karl Gerhardt wrote to Sam & Livy: “We two are chuck full of work. I feel as though I must carry out some of my schemes this summer” [MTP]. Note: because of Sam & Livy’s financial support, the Gerhardts wrote regularly.