July – In Elmira, N.Y. sometime during the month, Sam wrote to Annie A. Fields.

Alas, and alas, we are packed for Italy, and all valued letters are packed and stored with the silver and hymn-books. There were not many, of course, we being near neighbors, and communicating mainly by mouth. I wish I would send you Warner’s Invocation on St. Valentine’s morning, beginning:

“Come out into the slush, dear,

In your gracious galoshes shod,”

but that is packed, too. I am of no use in reminiscing—my memory is worthless. Warner was always saying brilliant things, felicitous things, but one can’t carry them in the mind in their exact language, and without that their glory is gone. But there is one remark—not made by Warner—which we do not forget. You will note it in the sunshine shed by his personality. One day a young friend of ours came in with a fine light in her eye, and said: ‘I’ve just had a good-morning from Mr. Warner, and I’m a happy girl for the day!’ [MTP: Mrs. James T. Fields, Charles Dudley Warner, 1904, p. 39-40].

Sometime during the month in Elmira, Sam wrote to daughter Clara in Riverdale, N.Y.

Jean thinks you are troubled about ice-cream expenses and such things, Benny dear. Don’t you worry, honey—just you order whatever you want, and you’ll see we’ll pull through all right. Get well—that is the main thing. Get well, and help us plan for Italy—Jean is already at it, and has laid in a barrel of stump-tail steel pens.

(Here comes a cussed reporter!)

Good-bye, dear Ben, I must go and kill him. Love from your mother and me. / Father [MTP]. Note: he drew a sketch at the bottom he labeled “Your Mother.” This has been dated by MTP as “June or July” but Sam and Livy did not leave Riverdale until July 1, so it could not have been June.

During a stay in Elmira, NY Sam would write “A Dog’s Tale,” a 4,400 word story considered his “most brazen concession to sentimentality” [Rasmussen 113]. See Dec. 1903 entry.

Bookman (NY) ran two caricatures of Mark Twain, p.449. Tenney: “MT, who ‘has announced his intention of leaving America and making his permanent home in Italy’” [38].

Herbert Bashford’s article, “The Literary Development of the West Coast,” ran in Atlantic Monthly, p. 6. Wells: “reviews the contributions of Western writers to American literature. Bashford praises the fructifying school of San Francisco journalism, where young writers have been discovered since the early days of Twain” [26].