August 10 Wednesday – Sam’s notebook:

Aug.10. Last night dreamed of a whaling cruise in a drop of water. Not by microscope, but actually. This would mean a reduction of the participants to a minuteness which would make them nearly invisible to God & he wouldn’t be interested in them any longer.

Lying thinking about this, concluded to write a dispute between a microscope & a telescope—one can pull a moral out of that [NB 40 TS 29-30].

In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam also wrote to Mr. Speiser, of the Krantz Hotel. “We intended to come in to-day, but as we learn that we cannot have a good look at the proposed set of rooms in the Krantz before the 16th, we have put off the journey a week or ten days.” Sam added a list of seven room numbers that Livy wanted to preview [MTP].

August 10 after – Just after the above notebook entry but before Aug. 22, Sam wrote a joke which Gribben writes “may be related to these allusions” of Thomas Moore’s Moses in the Bullrushes: A Sacred Drama (verse), well known at that time:

Teacher. Who was Moses’s mother?

Boy. Pharoah’s daughter.

No-no—she found him, in the bulrushes. Boy. Yas—that’s what she said.