September 24 Saturday – In Florence Sam wrote to William W. Phelps relating their “longest trip on record,” and asking for his assistance in securing some of their personal effects which had gone astray. He gave the name of Dietrich as one of the names of the shipping company, and their last address in Berlin, though he knew they’d moved, and then related their problem:

Well, they’ve shipped all our stuff here, with one important omission. That is to say, they have failed to send us a big rough box filled with valuable books, & have inadequately made up the deficit by sending us some unknown wanderer’s bundle of alpenstocks. Now I know that it isn’t the Embassy’s business to interest itself in such matters; still, if you will just this once depart from usage & precedent & send a gunboat around there, — or preferably one of your clerks — & ask them to hunt up the box of books, I will return the alpenstocks, & be forever obliged to you besides — for there’s manuscript in that box which I don’t want to have to write over again; also Susy’s diary & other sacred things. Of course I am doing what I can in the matter, but I have a wholesome idea of the value of high official solicitude in Germany when you want a thing done — hence I bother you.

Sam also wrote of Clara going to Berlin. He wanted to make her “wait a little” due to the cholera epidemic there [MTP].