February 12 Thursday – In Hartford Sam undoubtedly let loose some of his anger over the typesetter in a letter to the Hartford Gas Company. This letter suggests Livy was not yet home.

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds & blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone? [MTP].

Frederick J. Hall wrote that he’d “arranged for advertising the Sherman book in Saturday’s and Sunday’s New York papers and in the principal papers in Philadelphia, Washington, Boston and Chicago.” He hoped for “a boom” on sales. He also wrote about a proposed book with Captain John G. Bourke, whom, evidently, W.D. Howells had sent or recommended. Hall also wrote: “You had hardly left the office yesterday when Mr. James R. Osgood came in to see me. He is on this side now for a short time.” Osgood wanted to do business in England, but Sam was committed to Chatto & Windus [MTP].