January 2 Thursday – Desmond O’Brien reviewed CY in the London weekly Truth, p.25, calling it,

…a bizarre book, full of all kinds of laughable and delightful incongruities — the most striking of its incongruities, however, being unconscious, grim, and disenchanting…. His fooling is admirable, and his preaching is admirable, but they are mutually destructive [Tenney 19].

Sharecropper and hero of the Aug. 23, 1877 runaway horse-carriage, John T. Lewis wrote from Elmira to Sam, “Master of no words that will express my feelings on receiving the hansom [sic] book [CY] from you as a Christmas present” [MTP].