April 10 Friday – The Clemens family was at sea on the S.S. Wardha, bound for Port Louis, Mauritius. Sam also wrote in FE:
April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is about the divinest color known to nature.
It is strange and fine — Nature’s lavish generosities to her creatures. At least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided a home that is nobly spacious — a home which is forty miles deep and envelopes the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain — a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation….
Afternoon. The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate’s shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back. Nobody said anything, and the captain went away. I think he is becoming disheartened….Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship’s library: it contains no copy of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots….Not a sincere line in it, and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the heart. ….
Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it [ch LXII 611-15].
H.H. Rogers wrote to Sam, receiving no reply since his letter of Mar. 20. He announced a half-way proposition with Walter and Frank Bliss, so he passed it on to attorney Bainbridge Colby to work with Harper & Brothers, but Colby was busy with other matters so Rogers was now dealing direct with J. Henry Harper. He reassured Sam that anything he did in the matter of his Uniform Edition and the forthcoming new book, was subject to Sam’s approval. Rogers enclosed a four-paragraph agreement for Sam’s review, and would write again after a proposed interview with Harper the next week. Of the parties involved Rogers observed,
They can talk longer and cover a wider range than anybody I know. The only mistake those fellows made was in going into the Publishing business instead of the preaching business [MTHHR 203].