June 11 Tuesday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: This morning a man name o’ Johnson came in to talk to me about the King’s first editions. He was sent by Cartoonist Opper to AB, but not finding either he “bumped the bumps himself” and came along. He wants to make a bibliography of the King’s books. He sees money in it and wants to take me into a kind of partnership—“graft”—the King will say for I have written him a scrap of a note about it. I am so grateful for work, hard work, for now the loneliness is greater as Santa is ill with tonsillitis, really wretchedly ill. She is so enchanting a creature.
Jean got the King to promise that he would cable her and not Santa, upon his arrival in England, and Mr. Ashcroft was good enough to say that he’d cable his home office here and have them telephone at once to me. For Jean may or may not bother to let us know. Poor old Jean.
Poor Therese cried bitterly up on my room when she told me of Jean’s unkindnesses. A long, busy, monotonous day, cleaning the guest room.
Took Jean’s new maid Blanche up to her [MTP TS 68].
Lord Avebury (John Lubbock) wrote a short invitation for Sam to visit on the 25 th or any day while he was there, and he would “ask a few literary & scientific friends to meet you” [MTP].
Cronin, Reading & Co., Tailors, Plymouth, England wrote to Sam: “Dear Sir / We have been anxiously waiting to hear from you in your account, kindly let us have remittance by return as we cannot possibly let it stand any longer” [MTP]. Note: found in Sept. 19, 1907 file from William M. Clemens.
Harry Windsor Dearborn wrote for the Robert Fulton Monument Assoc. that he was sending “two exact copies of the invitations to Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland, as well as to Mr. and Mrs. H.H. Rogers” for the Sept. 23 affair [MTP].
W.K. Halstead wrote a postcard from Terre Haute, Ind. appreciating Sam’s Autobiography [MTP].
Rudyard Kipling wrote from Sussex, England,
…so glad to get your note of 31st May and to learn that you are staying at Browns—our pet particular hotel. / My June engagements (which are thick) have obliged me to decline several opportunities of meeting you but I didn’t care so much because we have got to meet in long red gowns and mortarboard caps at Oxford on the 25th June. /It’s delightful to think of you on this side the water and I don’t despair of seeing you down here. You can’t be over for only eleven days… [MTP].
Henry W. Lucy wrote from London enclosing invitations he hoped Sam would accept. Lucy reminded that Clemens had “meanly left New York on the very morning—is it four years ago? —that Mrs. Lucy and I set foot on it’s marble wharfs. So you owe us some compensation” [MTP].