February 4 Friday – In Hartford Sam finished the letter begun Feb. 3 to William Smith. He’d received Smith’s books and expressed a desire to visit Morley on his next trip to England. Both he and Livy enjoyed the “beautiful and interesting” books by Smith. In return, Sam sent Smith Grant’s Memoirs; he’d compiled an impressive list of statistics for the publishing of Grant’s autobiography to use at the upcoming Stationers’ Dinner, but decided they “would sound like an immense brag & be too loud a contrast to the book’s modesty.” He also ordered a “Mark Twain’s Scrapbook” for Smith, and confessed there wasn’t any uniform set of his books, either in America or England. Although hoping to visit England again soon, the Paige typesetter was holding him back:

Mrs. Clemens has been projecting a journey to England for this family — to begin early in May; but she will have to put that off some months or a year, for I’ve been building love of a machine during the past 11 months, & I can’t finish it before August or September; at least that is the present outlook. I can’t go to England without my machine; one doesn’t go abroad & leave his soul & entrails behind [MTP].

In a letter now lost, William Dean Howells had recently praised Sam’s writing, saying that his family truly enjoyed reading him. Sam responded:

That is the kind of approval to have; it is the sort that goes deep, & gives a deep pleasure, & stays restfully in the memory, & is not marred & modified by suspicion that it is not wholly sincere. The professional critic’s printed praise makes a body feel good, but you are not always sure he didn’t put it in for his own sake, to give his severities a Christly candid air & so make them the more effectively damaging. I will write for your family. I will take their verdict as the verdict of one part of posterity, & the verdict of my family as the verdict of the greater or lesser rest of posterity. My family don’t read me at all. Thus, the future is laid bare before me [MTHL 2: 581-2].

Sam also reassured Howells that sitting for Dora Wheeler would be enjoyable. Wheeler was working on a series of portraits of American writers, and evidently did not do one of Howells (see n2).