January 22 Wednesday – In Bombay, Sam’s notebook:

Wed., Jan 22, ’96. Read Edwin Lord Weeks’s article on Bombay in Nov. Harper [NB 36 TS 22].

Invited, with the family, to lunch with Lord Sandhurst, Governor of Bombay, at Government House, Malabar Point, tomorrow….had to decline — not able to go out before the lecture day after tomorrow, lest my cough jump on me again [NB 36 TS 24]. Note: Weeks’ article, “Recent Impressions of Anglo-Indian Life” [Gribben 754]. Note William Mansfield Sandhurst (1855-1921), British statesman, Governor of Bombay.

Sam was interviewed by the Times of India (pub. Jan 23) and the Bombay Gazette (pub. Jan. 23, 24) . See Scharnhorst, 270, 273, 277. Parsons writes of these interviews:

Marching to and fro while he manufactured smoke with his commodious brierroot pipe, he unwrapped his notions one after another: that he himself stumbled into journalism, not being “particular in those days,” then began “slipping” from one thing to another; that he worked when the mood took him “till late into the night,” with an interval at seven when “they pull me away from table to dress for dinner”; that interviews could only be “fluff and foam” after all, because the phrasing and the matter were spur-of-the-moment stuff [“MT India” 76].

Lord William M. Sandhurst wrote a note on Government of Bombay letterhead to Sam. “It would give us much pleasure, if with Mrs. & Miss Clemens you would come to lunch tomorrow at 1.30” [MTP].