January 17 Saturday – Sam and Cable gave two more performances at the Central Music Hall in Chicago. Before the matinee performance, Sam wrote Livy:
Livy darling, Clara Wiley & her husband came behind the scenes last night, & saw me. She looks as young as ever, & as pretty. I told Pond to telegraph his brother to send you every new date & hotel just as fast as the engagements were made. He attended to it. Dr Jackson called yesterday, & asked that he & his wife be remembered to you [MTP]
Sam also confided that his attorneys hadn’t yet come to terms with Estes & Lauriat, Boston booksellers, who had refused to drop the case on payment of Sam’s legal fees.
In the evening, Sam and Cable gave a second performance at the Central Music Hall in Chicago. Sam began a second letter to Livy, answering that a “Mr. Wilson is a fraud & a liar. It is a satisfaction to know that he had got hemorrages” (Wilson is unidentified) [MTP]. Note: Wecter points out, “Mark probably confuses hemorrhages with hemorrhoids” [LLMT 229].
Cable wrote home that the Chicago readings were “one of the greatest successes, if not the very greatest, artistic and pecuniary success of our season. The thermometer is 4° below zero and falling.”
Clemens’s story of Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer liberating runaway [Jim] was received with a continual tempest of merriment and when I gave “A Sound of Drums” I saw persons in tears all over the house. I was called back twice after my Creole songs and twice after “Mary’s Night Ride.” Mark & I both seemed especially inspired tonight & to inspire each other.” Along the tour people came up to Cable and thanked him, often in tears, for his Freedman paper [Turner, MT & GWC 89].
Charles H. Clark’s article “Authors at Home” ran in The Critic. This included a general account of Sam’s homes in Hartford and Elmira, “his current activities, including bicycling, billiards, the Monday Evening Club, and smoking cigars” [Tenney 15].
E.F. Blanchfield “desperate” and appealing “to your humanity” to see him [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “a fraud?”
Jane & Mollie Clemens (& to Livy) wrote. They had just rec’d the Grant book and had just finished HF. Mollie: “It simply amazes me to see how you kept up the dialects and the underlying moral lesson without a particle of apparent effort. It is real, to me.” Jane: “Dear Children. I wish to know why you say nothing about your income. Sam writes to me, he gives you the interest on twenty thousand dollars because it justly belongs to you. Love to all. Mother” [MTP].
Charles Webster wrote (Osgood to Webster Jan. 16 enclosed). Webster had just bought a 3-story brownstone for $13,130. He discussed various business matters. Osgood wrote he looked favorably on Webster’s offer to buy out their interest in the Library of Humor [MTP].