June 28 Sunday – At Quarry Farm, Livy wrote in her diary:

“This morning Theodore, Sue, Susy and I went down to church, it was Anniversary Sunday, there was a very large number large number baptized, first infants, later in the service young people, and older people all excepting the infants professed their faith. It was an exceedingly interesting and touching service” [MTP].

Sam didn’t go to church. Instead, he wrote to Karl Gerhardt. After scolding him for ordering negatives without asking the cost, Sam said he was “prodigiously glad” that Gerhardt was “succeeding with the little child’s bust”—one of Jesse Grant’s children [MTP].

Sam also wrote to his sister, Pamela Moffett, who had written of a crop failure in her son Samuel Moffett’s farming effort. Sam felt his nephew had been more suited for a career in science or academia.

Oh, well, Sam’s experience is that of everybody else: he must waste half of his life in finding out what he was sent into the world to do, when he could just as well have found out before he was seventeen. I suppose Sam must continue the usual course: he must go on experimenting in one mistaken occupation after another; & at last, at forty, strike the right one & call himself an ass for not seeing that that was the right one in the beginning. Of course there are people who never do find out what they were intended for—Orion, for instance, who at sixty is still meddling with the law, when if God would grant him but one single fleeting lucid interval he could not help but perceive that he is no more fitted for that occupation than is a horse [MTP].

Karl Gerhardt wrote about Sam’s “beautiful perfect letter” which made the rounds, including Gen. Grant. He wrote about a plan of Jesse Grant’s involving the Sultan of Turkey and Gov. Stanford of Calif. [MTP].