December 24 Saturday – Sam related this family’s evening to William Dean Howells in his Dec. 30:

At the house of an English friend, on Christmas Eve, we saw the Mouse-Trap played, & well played. I thought the house would kill itself with laughter. By George they played with life! & it was most devastatingly funny. And it was well they did, for they put us Clemenses in the front seat, & if they had played it poorly I would have assaulted them. The head young man & girl were Americans, the other parts were taken by English, Irish & Scotch girls. Then there was a nigger-minstrel show, of the old sort, & I enjoyed that, too, for the nigger-show was always a passion of mine. This one was created & managed by a Quaker doctor from Philada (23 years old), & he was the middle man. There were 9 others—5 Americans from 5 states, & a Scotchman, 2 Englishmen & an Irishman—all postgraduate-medical young fellows, of course—or, it could be music; but it would be bound to be one or the other [MTHL 2: 684]. Note: The Mouse-Trap was a farce by Howells originally published in Dec. 1866 Harper’s, and released as a book in England, 1897.

Nathaniel Zook wrote a rather disjointed and bizarre letter to Sam, about his being in prison and proposing to write a book. He may have been unbalanced [MTP].