July 10 Sunday – In Elmira and evidently past his bout with dyspepsia, Sam wrote to Mollie Clemens about a perfect day on the idyllic hilltop in his octagonal study at Quarry Farm.

This is a superb Sunday for weather — very cloudy, and the thermometer as low as 65. The city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas-curtained summer-house 50 yards away on a higher (the highest) point; the cats are loafing over at “Ellersbie” which is the children’s estate and the dwelling-house in their own private grounds (by deed from Susie Crane) a hundred yards from the study, amongst the clover and young oaks and willows. Livy is down at the house, but I shall now go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and the hammocks — whence a great panorama of distant hill and valley and city is seeable. The children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods. It is a perfect day indeed [MTP].

Kaplan writes, “Later, at the piano, he sang — “Go Down, Moses,” “Gospel Train,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Die Wacht am Rhein,” “Die Lorelei” — and then he read late into the night [297].

Pamela Moffett wrote to Sam, quoting Annie Webster’s letter that the doctor said Charles Webster needed a year’s rest; that he was in “great danger” and suffered from neuralgia in the head [MTP].

John Brusnahan wrote from the N.Y. Herald office answering Sam’s July 6, that he’d had only 15 or 20 minutes to examine the Tribune’s machine, but it was a one-man machine; speed claimed was 50,000 ems in ten hours, which is what Sam wrote on the envelope [MTP].