February 9 Monday – In Indianapolis, Sam wrote Livy a letter full of indignation and disgust with George W. Cable. He told of Cable interrupting an anecdote at a Saturday evening reception to tell him he was leaving (due to the Sabbath). Sam accused Cable of “insulting & insolent ways with servants” and relayed Pond’s opinion that the “servants of the Everett House all hate him,” and that he would starve himself if on his own expenses, but his “appetite is insatiable” if “somebody else is paying….” Sam said Cable wouldn’t even cross a bridge on a Sunday, though he’d wanted to hear Beecher. For Sam this was:

“…the most beggardly disease, the pitiful, the most contemptible mange that ever a grown creature was afflicted withal” [MTP].

Sam and Cable gave a reading at the Comstock’s Opera House, Columbus, Ohio. Sam told of the day and the performance in his Feb. 10 letter:

Livy darling, rode all day in a smoking car, stopping every 30 yards, arrived here in a rain storm about 2 hours after dark, jumped into evening dress in a desperate hurry & came before a full Opera house of the handsomest people you ever saw, & made them shout, & tore them all to pieces till half past 10, & not an individual deserted till the thing was over [MTP].