December 20 Friday – Sam and Smythe left Scone, Australia by train at 11:25 a.m. While on the train Sam kept notes of town names, possibly for use in a poem he included in FE.

Back to Sydney. Blazing hot again. From the newspaper, and from the map, I have made a collection of curious names of Australasian towns, with the idea of making a poem out of them [see three columns of names and a poem, “A Sweltering Day in Australia,” p.328-9]….It may be best to build the poem now, and make the weather help…Those are good words for poetry. Among the best I have ever seen. There are 81 in the list. I did not need them all, but I have knocked down 66 of them; which is a good bag, it seems to me, for a person not in the business. Perhaps a poet laureate could do better, but a poet laureate gets wages, and that is different. When I write poetry I do not get any wages; often I lose money by it. The best word in that list, and the most musical and gurgly, is Woolloomoolloo. It is a place near Sydney, and is a favorite pleasure-resort. It has eight O’s in it [FE ch XXXVI 327-30].

Sam arrived in Sydney at 7:15 p.m. and was a bit late for his “At Home” performance at the School of Arts on Pitt Street. He used his adventures in the December heat as an introduction and claimed to have changed clothes on the train. He used the McWilliams lightning story he first told at Dunedin, but left out the Australian poem. He made a few closing remarks on the war scare, hoping that “we shall soon cease to be annoyed by all this unpleasant, unprofitable and unbrotherly war talk.” Supposedly a man came 3,000 miles from the Gulf of Carpentaria to hear him. Sam reunited with Livy and Clara at the Australia Hotel. 

Reviews published: Dec. 21: Sydney Daily Telegraph; Sydney Morning Herald; Dec. 28: Bulletin. Interview published this day, Herbert Low’s in Sydney Daily Telegraph [Shillingsburg, “Down Under” 31; At Home 187-8].

Livy began a letter to Susan Crane that she finished Dec. 22, 23 and Dec. 26: “it is just the season when every one is getting away from the city. We went this afternoon to make two calls, and found both families just on the [illegible word] of leaving town and both of them for a long period” [MTP].