November 21 Friday – Sam and Livy arrived in Elmira and went to Olivia Lewis Langdon’s bedside [Nov. 27 to Howells].

Thomas F. Shields, the fired N.Y. horse-car conductor, wrote to Sam after receiving his telegram several days before. Shields, upon applying back to the Horse-Car Co., was reinstated, albeit as an “extra conductor”; he wrote it would “take some time before I get a steady car again” [MTP].

Joseph P. Smith for Urbana (Ohio) Daily Citizen sent Sam a printed card asking him to “kindly indicate…which among the shorter poems of the English language is your favorite?” [MTP]. Note: an unused printed post card for return is with the letter. Likely Sam had no favorite or didn’t wish it known.

Daniel Whitford wrote to Sam restating the Frohman-House-Richardson fiasco on the P&P play:

You have a contract with Mr. Frohman allowing him to produce the play. He has been enjoined by the Court from producing it. When the injunction was served upon him, Mr. Frohman might have stopped, and you would have had no remedy against him until the injunction was removed. His engagements were evidently such that he could not stop, so he made an arrangement with House to give him a sum of money outright and pay over to his counsel the royalties due to you and Mrs. Richardson, to be returned when the suit between you and House was decided, if it was found that the injunction was properly granted. This, of course, cannot bind you as you had nothing to do with it. As between you and Mr. Frohman this is the situation: You sue him for the royalties and he defends on the ground that you had no right to contract with him for the production of the play. That involves a litigation of two or three years. Frohman may be worthless by that time. …

I now advise that we put the cause on the calendar and be prepared to try it in February….House’s play having failed will be a full moral justification for your throwing him overboard. If we are beaten in the court below we will go to the higher courts until the law is settled. Unless we show that we are in earnest this will hang along forever…[MTP].

November 21-24 Monday – Sometime after Sam and Livy left for Elmira, Jean Clemens, just past her tenth birthday was felled by a severe illness. Dr. E.W. Kellogg and Dr. Edward K. Root did not or could not diagnose what may have been the onset of epilepsy, which would attack her again at age sixteen [Powers, MT A Life 532; Nov. 26, 27 to Livy]. When word reached Elmira, Sam left again for Hartford and then to Bryn Mawr to retrieve Susy.