March 16 Wednesday – In Hartford Sam responded to his brother’s letters of Mar. 13 and 14. Orion had evidently expressed concern about reading about the embezzler, Frank M. Scott at Webster & Co., arrested on Mar. 11.

Nobody is crippled — to hurt.

Of course the cashier’s theft vexes me; but that is all; it is a momentary annoyance….There is so much else to talk about in this live house & this live epoch of the world, that Susie & Clara did not know there had been a robbery, until yesterday, when one of the Warners spoke to them about it.

Sam decried the “real financial discomfort” — the loss of the unwritten Henry Ward Beecher autobiography, which he saw as a $100,000 hit [MTP].

Sarah O. Jewett for Longfellow Memorial Committee wrote to Sam, to persuade forgoing his reading at Yale’s Kent Club and come to the Mar. 31 reading at the Boston Museum at 2 p.m. [MTP].