August 11 Tuesday – At Highfield House, Portsmouth Road, Guildford, England, Sam wrote to Andrew Chatto:

We’ve got ourselves located here an hour from London, for a month: & in the meantime we are spying around for a house for the winter. Mrs. Clemens is out on that quest to-day, in the neighborhood of London.

Sam anticipated Chatto coming for a visit and explained that “ours is a mighty plain cook” but that any time he might “run down” from London he could expect a chop or a steak. Evidently it had been very hot the past few days, as he wrote the “weather had been ordered from hell,” but that it was “ordered from heaven to-day” [MTP]. Note: From the Aug. 10 and this letter it is clear the Clemenses took possession of the Guildford house on this day; Sam’s Aug. 14 to Anna Goodenough gives the rental five weeks. Powers calls Guildford “a graceful 12th-century farming village southeast of London, where Lewis Carroll was living out his final years” [MT A Life 576].

Sam also wrote a short note to Ainsworth R. Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, applying to re-copyright IA. This was referred to in his Aug. 12 to H.H. Rogers as enclosed.

In Hartford Sue Crane wrote to Sam; the letter not extant but mentioned in Sam’s Aug. 26 to Livy.