August 15 Saturday – In Redding, Conn. Sam wrote to Dorothy Sturgis.

Dear Dorothy:

Good! You will be very welcome.

To-day, in a lovely place in the woods a mile & a half from here we visited a fine swimming- pool a hundred yards long, twenty wide & 26 feet deep—water as clear as crystal, with a perpendicular rock jumping-off place 15 feet high—densely wooded shores all around. You get to it by an obscure path leading from the distant wagon-road. It is an ideal bathing-place. I thought of you, but you can’t use it, because there is no bath-house. But you shall go & look at it—& grieve because you can’t get into it. If I had it on my land there’d be a bath-house. / With love & best wishes … [MTP].

Sam also wrote to William Henry Watts in Tewkesbury, England.

Dear Sir: / I highly prize the pipes, & shall intimate to people that Raleigh smoked them—& doubtless he did. After a little practice I shall be able to go further & say that he did. They will then be the most interesting features of my library’s decorations. The horse-shoe is attracting a good deal of attention, because I have intimated that the Conqueror’s horse cast it. It will attract more when I get my hand in & say he cast it.

I thank you for the pipes & the shoe; also for the Official Guide, which I read through at a single sitting. If a person should say that about a book of mine I should regard it as good evidence of the book’s interest. / Very truly Yours [MTP].

Note: an 1894 Tewkesbury directory lists Watts as a “Builders’ Foreman.”  W.H. Watts & Son, formed in 1903, sold all sorts of household goods. In his 1917 volumes of MT’s letters, Paine offers a note on the above letter: “…is an acknowledgement of an interesting souvenir from the battle-field of Tewksbury (1471), and some relics of the Cavalier and Roundhead Regiments encamped at Tewksbury in 1643” [812]. See July 10 from Watts.

William Dean Howells wrote from Kittery Point, Maine to Sam.

My dear Clemens:

I will surely and gladly come to see you when I go up to New York about the middle of next month, not merely because you live in the house that Jack built, [his son, John Mead Howells was the architect of Stormfield] but because I want to pour out on you the praise that has been filling me up ever since I re-re-re-read The Innocents Abroad last winter in Rome. I wonder you could write it, and I wonder you could write the Ct. Yankee, which I re-re-read after I got home. I could not have written it myself, although it is the most delightful, truest, most humane, sweetest fancy that ever was. Now that you have taken the pen into your own hand, why don’t you try something like it in your old age?

      The other morning, after first waking, I dreamt of talking with a girl in Bermuda. I said that as it was coming spring I supposed she would be going north, but she said “No, we are going further into the tropics,” and I made the reflection how perfectly natural that was, when she added, “We want to see some Pepper Trees, and hear a pigeon sing.” Then it occurred to me that I had never heard a pigeon sing, and that it must be very nice.

      Somewhere I have some more letters of yours, and I will send them as soon as I can think where I put them. But for goodness’ sake, haven’t you enough now?

      My poor wife has been suffering with her teeth all summer, and can only gnash out her thanks to you for remembering her. Pilla thanks you too, tho’ not so hopelessly.

      The unmuffled motor boats have made this place a pandemonium, and I am afraid we cannot come here any more. I am thinking of going to England as a summer resort. But there are the English. Unmuffled too.      Yours ever, / W.D. Howells [MTHL 2: 833-4].

Isabel Lyon’s journal: “A lazy day. A busy day. The Demings and Hildegarde Hawthorne came for tea”  [MTP: IVL TS 59].