February 25 Saturday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Sam wrote to Richard Watson Gilder.

I have abandoned my Autobiography, & am not going to finish it; but I took a reminiscent chapter out of it some time ago & had it copyrighted & had it type-written, thinking it would make a readable magazine article; & sent it to my friend H.H. Rogers, 26 Broadway.

If you would like to look at it, send there & get it. It is about the burning of the clipper “Hornet” on the Equator thirty-three years ago. The survivors made 4,000 miles in an open boat on 10 days’ provisions, & I was in Honolulu when those scarecrows arrived. One of them lives in Hartford, now, & is a professor in Trinity College there. I think it’s a stunning shipwreck, & beats Captain Bligh’s & the other famous ones.

Sam closed with a note they were impatient to return home, hoping to be there by October, and asking if there was a house for rent in Gilder’s neighborhood “at an endurable figure” [MTP]. Note: the lined-out phrase is interesting in the light of “My Debut as a Literary Person” being treated as autobiography and now collected in AMT 1: 127-144].

Note: Sam’s piece on the Hornet would be renamed, “My Debut as a Literary Person,” and would run in the Nov. 1899 Century. Brothers Samuel and Henry Ferguson (1848-1917) of Stamford, Conn. were passengers on the Hornet and supported Captain Josiah A. Mitchell during the ordeal; Samuel died Oct. 1, 1866 in Santa Clara, Calif. of tuberculosis and the long exposure; Henry graduated from Trinity College in 1868 and became professor of history and politics there. In 1906 he returned to the Headmaster post at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H. where he had graduated so many years before. Sam’s “Debut” included passages from Henry and Mitchell’s diaries. Their story and photograph are online at StamfordHistory.org. See also MTL 1: 354n2.

Sam also wrote to an unidentified man (from some “Society”) to decline an invitation [MTP].

Sam also wrote to an Franklin G. Whitmore, advising he’d directed Frank Bliss to send his January check to Whitmore. He might have another article for Century, for which he would have payment forwarded to Whitmore. He shared plans to “get a good and reasonable house in New York we mean to ship for America in October” [MTP].

Sam’s essay, “The ‘Austrian Parliamentary System’? Government by Article 14” ran in the Feb. 25 issue of Lords and Commons (London) . “It summarized the fourteenth article of the Austrian constitution as ‘a Constitution all by itself…It means anything you please, but it does not mean the same thing to any two people…the Government can commit political adultery with it every day, and while everybody may know it, nobody can prove it’” [MTHHR 390n2].