August 7 Tuesday – In Elmira Sam wrote to Frank Millet, responding to a recent letter. “All the world’s a stage & everybody is writing plays for it,” Sam wrote, reshaping a line from Shakespeare. Sam thought Ah Sin was going well; Joaquin Miller had a play opening at Wood’s Museum in New York on Aug. 27, but Sam couldn’t recall the name of it (The Danites, or, the Heart of the Sierras opened in NYC on Aug. 22); Howells had written a play for the matinee idol Lawrence Barrett and made good “pecuniary terms with him & Barrett is vastly pleased”; Petroleum Nasby wanted to write a play with Sam, but it wasn’t pursued—Sam saw in the papers that Nasby found another collaborator. Sam wrote he never heard about Prentice Mulford; Ambrose Bierce was in San Francisco, and Charley Stoddard hadn’t turned up yet, but Sam supposed he was still on “the other side”—all responses to probable questions by Millet [MTLE 2: 128].

Assuming Sam’s letter of Aug. 6 was acted upon, the Clemens family went to Ithaca, New York for a two-day visit to Hjalmar H. Boyesen and family. They were back in Elmira by Aug. 11.