July 22 Sunday – Sam was again at the Oriental Hotel in Manhattan Beach, New York, staying with the Rogers family. On July 23 he wrote Henry C. Robinson that he’d spent the “8 or 9 days that I’ve been in America” at the Oriental in the evenings, and the Players in the daytime. The Oriental had a band but it did not play on Sunday, so Cara Rogers Duff asked Sam if he wouldn’t take the place of the band’s entertainment and give a private reading for about 20 of their personal friends. Sam ran uptown at 4 p.m. to get his manuscript of “Rev. Samuel Jones’s Reception in Heaven,” which LLMT calls “a variant upon the theme which also inspired ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.’” It was never published and marked “forbidden by Mrs. S.L.C.” [304]. Sam returned at 8 p.m. Fatout lists this impromptu little reading and writes about the subject of Sam’s talk:

“Samuel Porter Jones (1847-1906) was an American temperance advocate. A Georgia lawyer who drank too much, he converted to Methodism (1872), and became a famous exhorter of the damnation-and-brimstone variety. He denounced profanity as well as liquor, often so heatedly that his own language became spectacularly profane. See H. L. Mencken, “Hell and Its Outskirts,” New Yorker (October 23, 1948)” [MT Speaking 662].

In his wee-hours letter of July 23 to Livy, Sam recalled the evening:

I read Rev. Sam Jones’s Reception in Heaven, & we had a gay time over it. Then shandy-gaff for the gentlemen & buttermilk & seltzer-lemonades for the ladies; then a literary chat & smoke with the landlord till midnight; then to my room [July 23 to Livy].