May 24 Saturday – Sam wrote from Hartford, the last extant business letter to James R. Osgood. He’d received the sketches left out of The Stolen White Elephant. Though business had ended between the two men with Sam forming his own publishing company with Charles Webster, friendly relations continued, as evidenced by the sharing of Sam’s off-color story, 1601.

“I have mailed you a 1601; but mind, if it is for a lady you are to assume the authorship of it yourself.

I have invented a new game of billiards, and I want you to stop over with us, next time you are passing Hartford, and try it on. It is meaner than cushion caroms—a good deal meaner. Truly Yours, /S.L. Clemens” [MTLTP 168].

Sam also wrote to Charles Webster.

“Some of the pictures are good, but none of them are very very good. The faces are generally ugly, & wrenched into over-expression amounting sometimes to distortion…. The pictures will do—they will just barely do—& that is the best I can say for them” [MTBus 255]. Note: Many of the pictures were redrawn.

Sam also wrote to William Dean Howells:

      Good land, have you seen the “poems” of that South Carolina idiot, “Belton O’Neall Townsend, A B. & Attorney at Law?” —& above all, the dedication of them to you?

      If you did write him what he says you did, you richly deserve hanging; & if you didn’t, he deserves hanging.—But he deserves hanging any-way & in any & all cases—no, boiling, gutting, brazing in a mortar—no, no, there is no death that can meet his case. Now think of this literary louse dedicating his garbage to you, & quoting encouraging compliments from you & poor dead Longfellow. Let us hope there is a hell, for this poets sake, who carries his bowels in his skull, & when they operate works the discharge into rhyme & prints it.

      Ah, if he had only dedicated this diarrhea to Aldrich, I could just howl with delight; but the joke is lost on you—just about wasted. Ys Ever Mark [MTHL 2: 488]. Note: Howells responded on May 26.