March 25 Friday – In Hartford Sam responded to a letter from Mrs. Jenny S. Boardman, once Jenny Stevens, daughter of “the old jeweler of Hannibal, & sister of Ed, John & Dick” [Apr. 2 to Pamela]. Jenny had written about the idyllic Mississippi riverboat days.

You have spirited me back to a vanished world & the companionship of phantoms. But how dear they are, & how beautiful they seem!…I have seemed like some banished Adam who is revisiting his half-forgotten Paradise & wondering how the arid outside world could ever have seemed green & fair to him [MTP].

Note: Pettit quotes this last segment juxtaposed with an 1881 notebook entry of disillusionment: “…a solemn, depressing, pathetic spectacle” of the South. [65]. See also Wecter, p.63. Ed Stevens was part of Sam’s brief Confederate “service.”

Charles Webster wrote to Sam about the Frank M. Scott embezzlement. He hoped to recover “in the neighborhood of $6,000” from the liquidation of Scott’s assets, including a house under construction in Roseville, N.J.

I feel that he should at least be sent to States Prison for as much as five years….I think it would be a miscarriage of justice if he was sentenced to a shorter term; …five years would sufficiently punish him, as it would dis-franchise him and hold him up as an example to others [MTNJ 3: 283-4n194].

Annie A. Fields wrote, glad Sam could come on Wednesday, and urging him to bring Livy — the drafts were good in their fireplace and “we are not afraid of smoke!” [MTP].

Richard W. Gilder for Century Magazine wrote to Sam that they’d sent one set of proofs for “English As She Is Taught” on Mar. 23 and another out Mar. 24 — telegraph if not received [MTP].