February 2 Sunday – Sam wrote from Munich to the editor of the Hartford  Courant, enclosing a Jan. 11 article of that paper that he’d just received. The article was about tramps who had been jailed in Hartford. Sam was gratified that Hartford had “at last ceased to be the Tramp’s Heaven.” He wrote of the positive Munich experience with beggars after giving them work and denying handouts.

For the past two months, Sam wrote, he’d walked daily “through a densely populated part of the city, yet” he had “never once been accosted by a beggar.” He hadn’t once seen a beggar. but his landlord, Madame B., as he called her, had received over 450 tramps in that time! Hartford has had 250 Madame B’s, Sam concluded, and that was the problem. Sam then told of a humorous story of a Frenchman coming to see Mrs. B. for a handout [MTLE 4:14-18]. The letter was not mailed [MTNJ 2: 260n92].

Sam also wrote to William Dean Howells and told a cute story about eavesdropping on his daughter’s introduction to a visiting little girl who bragged [MTLE 4:19].

Livy inscribed a copy of Paul von Heyse’s (1830-1914) 3 volume In Paradiese. Roman in Sieben Buchern (1876): “Saml. L. Clemens / Feb. 2nd 1879 / Munich / Bavaria”; also inscribed identically were 3 volumes of Heyse’s Kinder der Wel, and Gottfried Keller’s 3 volume Die Leute vol Seldwyla [Gribben 312; 365].