January 2 Wednesday – At 169 rue de l’Université in Paris Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

Yours of Dec. 21 [not extant] has arrived, containing the circular to stockholders and I guess the Co will really quit — there doesn’t seem to be any other wise course.

There’s one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is, that it reverses my horoscope. The proverb says, “Born luck, always lucky,” and I am very superstitious. As a small boy I was notoriously lucky. It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a 2/3 drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. When the “Pennsylvania” blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60 others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “it means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half — he was born lucky.” Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business-dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain that that machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed me lots of times, but I couldn’t shake off the confidence of a life time in my luck.

Sam added he had an idea for a new book, probably Tom Sawyer, Detective, that had kept him up all night, beginning it and completing it in his mind. He would start in on it “the minute” he finished JA [MTHHR 115-6].

A variety of books from Chatto & Windus arrived [Jan. 3 to Chatto].