December 18 Wednesday – In Boston, William Dean Howells wrote a short note to Sam, enclosing “another letter from my old Tennessee woman” (unidentified) that was “full of fervor and most ‘fortimate’ inventions in spelling.” Howells thought Sam and Livy might want to see the letter and asked for its return [MTHL 2: 624]. Note: Sam would comment on the old woman’s letter in his Dec. 23 to Howells.

In Hartford Sam wrote to his mother-in-law, Olivia Lewis Langdon about a “most darling visit with” her and Susan Crane in New York. “I do not think we could have improved it in any way except by staying longer,” he wrote. See Dec. 9-12 entry.

Livy would have written you long ago, for she has had otherwise little or nothing to do that fourteen people & a horse couldn’t do, but every time she got an idle couple of days some hindrance or other always shoved itself in the way & prevented her from writing.

Sam also confided that he’d been “laid up with a cold” since he’d seen her and “only got out on the street yesterday.” He’d missed his Dec. 14 West Point engagement, postponing it for three weeks. The children were well and “hard at work at their lessons,” so much so and so out of sight that,

…the memory grows dim & I often mistake them for the children of strangers & am embarrassed in their presence [MTP].

Sam also sent documents to Andrew Chatto, with a short note, “Respectfully submitted to you, Chatto” [MTP].

Sam’s notebook: Dec. 18 Karl Gerhardt………one [Paige royalty sent] [3: 569].

Frederick J. Hall wrote a short note to Sam that Henry Watterson was in town [MTP].

Isabel Von Oppen wrote from Londonderry, Ireland to Sam. Or rather, either her secretary did or she liked to write about her self in the third-person. The letter rambles but talks of the nine years Isabel lived in the US, of her relatives in the South and her residence in the North not far from “Clements.” She enclosed a “Memoranda” (not in the file) asking for “a little trifling sum in cash in exchange for it” [MTP].

Luca L. Moore wrote to Sam, “begging permission to translate into German such of” his books “as have not yet appeared in this tongue.” Sam referred it to Chatto, as he usually did for such requests [MTP].