August 31 Thursday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote to Katharine B. Clemens (Mrs. James Ross Clemens) now in Cobourg, Canada.
I am just back from a gout-smitten 3-weeks’ visit to Clara in her rest-cure in Norfolk, Conn; & short as the distance is, I find the travel worse than the gout. I shan’t take any more journeys.
St. Louisians do not seem to mind railroading at all—they come here every summer, & they have houses of their own here. I suppose Miss Tracy saw Jean, not Clara, but Jean is absent & I can’t find out.
Clara has made a large progress in these 12 months of resting. She discharged her trained nurse 3 weeks ago, & has no one with her now but an old friend of our family. She will give up her house & return to New York in October & we shall follow early in November. Then we hope she can come & live with us.
Jean & I have been keeping house here since the first of May & having a pleasant time. We are offered this house from April to November of next year, & are expecting to take it. Then I shall probably have to run down to New York for a day or two during the summer, in which case I shall hope to see you & D . Jim and your posterity at Jamestown, R.I. I shall count upon it. It was a great pleasure to hear
I am enclosing my kindest regards to you & the excellent surgeon, & am / Sincerely…. [MTP].
Sam also wrote to George B. Harvey.
Dear Colonel: / Wait a while, & see! It is a good sign—your not detecting me in that article. If it really passes through undiscovered, it will show that I can disguise myself. In which case— good! for I have a book which I want to publish anonymously if I can work it off without getting discovered.
Also, I can then contribute malicious things to your page of The Weekly, & get you the obloquy & the abuse.
A Milwaukee sculptor has sent me a plaster cast from a bas-relief of me which he made from a portrait in Harpers, & I think it is very good indeed—plenty good enough to print, some time, in the Monthly or the Weekly. But he wants to make a new one, from new photos, & that’s the idea I like, if he can pull it off before the end of November & represent me at the grand age of 70, which is a birthday to be really proud of, for it puts me distinctly ahead of Pierpont Morgan, Carnegie, Rogers, Rockefeller, Howells, Burroughs, Wayne MacVeagh, Grover Cleveland, & every other celebrated old person in the whole country except the Brontosaur & Chauncey Depew.
Oh, I’ve been having it!—the gout. Two solid weeks of it. But I am limping around, now, & progressing [MTP]. Note: the Milwaukee sculptor was John Marr. See Aug. 21.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: This morning I played for Mr. Clemens and then he said “Now come up stairs.” We went up to the study and he read aloud to me a part of his Gospel, his unpublishable Gospel. But oh it is wonderful, always I’ve been afraid of it, but that was because my only knowledge of it was through Jean who hates it, and if you hate a thing you can’t see any of its good. This is full of wonderful thoughts—beautiful thoughts, terrible truths, oh such a summing up of human motives and if it belittles—does it belittle?—every human effort, it also has the power to lift you above that effort, and make you fierce in your wish to better your own conduct, such poor stuff your conduct is.
The talk at dinner tonight. Mr. Clemens started by saying that last year he read it at Tyringham and again now and it always interested him to think of the little monarchy that had existed for 60 years here in America, a real little monarchy. It was made by the grant of Charles I of the tract of land which is now Maryland to Calvert, Lord Baltimore. All authority had been vested in him. He could coin money, make laws, do anything that a king could do.
And then he talked about his favorite subject, microbes. He was in Agra two days after the discovery was made that the Cholera germ couldn’t live in the water of the Ganges, and it can’t, although that river is a sewer, a mighty sewer. It purifies every unclean rotting thing that is emptied into it. Even the dead bodies of the poor natives whose relatives haven’t money enough to buy the fuel to burn away their dead, are scorched over with the small amount of fuel that they can buy and then into the river, the mighty sacred river after they are thrown and no devastating disease comes of it [MTP TS 92-93].
Ralph W. Ashcroft wrote on Koy-Lo Co. letterhead to Sam. “The enclosed is what Hammond will get on Saturday next, unless, before then, he swims ashore from the rotten, badly-peppered hulk on which he has been flying his Plasmon flag” [MTP].
Margaret Higginson Barney wrote (likely from Dublin,N.H.) to Sam thanking him and his daughter for the little trunk [MTP]. Note: Margaret had recently married Dr. Barney.
Arthur J. Roberts wrote from Gilead, Maine to thank Sam for his “brave utterance in reference to the Peace of Oyster Bay…The only real significance this war ever had lay in the possibility of its bringing liberty to the Russian people” [MTP]. Note: on the env Miss Lyon wrote: “Letters of appreciation of Mr. Clemens’s Peace Telegram to the Boston Globe. Aug. 30, 1905”
August 31 ca. – In Dublin, N.H. Sam wrote a note to Isabel V. Lyon on Ralph W. Ashcroft’s Aug. 18 letter, directing her to send Ashcroft the $150 needed by attorney Baldwin to contest the appeal by Henry A. Butters, et al, to the US Circuit Court of Appeals [MTP].