February 24 Sunday – In Cambridge, Mass., Howells wrote to Sam.
“I must see you somehow, before you go. I’m in dreadfully low spirits about it….I was afraid your silence meant something wicked” [MTHL 1: 218].
Sam wrote from Hartford to Frank W. Cheney (1832-1909) successful Hartford businessman from a long-time Hartford family. Wesley Hart, who had served a six-month sentence for burglary in 1873 at Wethersfield State Prison, some five miles from Sam’s Farmington Avenue home, sent Sam a model ship delivered at night by two men, saying it was a present.
I couldn’t hurl the man’s present at his head, neither could I accept it from a prisoner. I wrote & said I would sell the ship for him if he would set a price; or buy it myself at $50. He said send the $50 to his aged father at Middletown, which I did…/ I have never seen Wesley Hart; but from what I have heard he must be a criminal whose crimes are modified, softened, almost neutralized, by his native chuckle-headedness. He entered Mrs. Henry Perkins’s house, once, to rob it, collected the silver together, then lay down on a sofa to take a nap, & didn’t wake up any more till Mrs. Perkins called him to breakfast [MTLE 3: 20].