June 29 Saturday – John Horne an autograph seeker in Glasgow, Scotland wrote to Sam, responding to Sam’s June 19 answer. Horne asked if Sam could and would “bless” him with James Russell Lowell’s autograph, since Sam had mentioned getting all those autographs on April Fools’ Day in 1884 [MTP].

Sam also responded to a letter from H.H. Rogers, evidently suggesting Sam simply go on his tour and ignore the subpoenas, or perhaps simply asking the what-if.

No, indeedy, it won’t answer. It would [be] a bad advertisement for my lecture-trip to have all the papers here and in Australia saying I have dodged the courts and fled the country. I mustn’t do it. If Colby had told me of this danger I wouldn’t have remained in this State.

Sam’s plan was to send a doctor’s certificate of his condition, and get the court date postponed to July 8. Then go to New York on July 4 and meet the creditors July 5 or 6 and propose “a composition” (solution) “in the form of an addition of 10 per cent to what the Webster assets produces.” Sam hoped Rogers would approve of this plan and that Bainbridge Colby could get an immediate assembly of the creditors “if he can ever be got to stir his stumps”. Sam ended with,

You are just as dear and good as you can be, and the madam and I are building high and getting to Fairhaven.

Charley Langdon is waiting to carry this down the hill [MTHHR 159-60].

Sam also wrote one of his famous aphorisms to an unidentified person:

Let us endeavor to so live that when we die even the undertaker will be sorry [MTP].

Frank Bliss wrote to Sam, letter not extant but mentioned in Sam’s July 1 to Bliss [MTP].