August 25 Saturday – Sam was probably staying at the Occidental Hotel [MTL 1: 359n2; Sanborn 295]. Sam received and answered a letter from his old Hannibal and pilot friend, Will Bowen. You write me of the boats, thinking I may yet feel an interest in the old business. You bet your life I do. It is about the only thing I do feel any interest in & yet I can hear least about it. If I were two years younger, I would come back & learn the river over again. But it is too late now. I am too lazy for 14-day trips—too fond of running all night & sleeping all day—too fond of sloshing around, talking with people….Marry be d—d. I am too old to marry. I am nearly 31. I have got gray hairs in my head. Women appear to like me, but d—n them, they don’t love me [MTL 1: 358-9].
Sam’s article, “The Moral Phenomenon,” (a whimsical title Sam gave himself) ran in the Californian [Schmidt]. In the same publication appeared a squib about the promise of Sam’s Union letters collected into a possible book. The article was “probably [by] his friend James F. Bowman (1826-1882)—poet, journalist, and editor pro tem of the Californian—who wrote:”
THERE SEEMS TO BE a very general impression that Mark Twain’s Sandwich Island letters to the Sacramento Union possess sufficient intrinsic interest and value to justify their publication in book form. If the writer could be persuaded to collect and revise them, he would have no difficulty in finding a publisher; and we are satisfied that the book would prove both a literary and a pecuniary success [MTL 2: 3].