May 5 Tuesday – Sam wrote a short note from Hartford to Orion, enclosing a letter from a relative he had “no shred of remembrance of. …maybe you & Ma may like to read her letter. All well & send love” [MTP]. Note: see Apr. 24: Clemma L. Bradley (nee Lampton) from McKinney, Texas.

Sam also wrote a longer letter to Howells, praising him on his reading at the Apr. 28-9 American Copyright League in New York. Sam had sometimes teased Howells about his ability to read to an audience, but now he was effusive:

Who taught you to read? Observation & thought, I guess. And practice at the Tavern Club?—yes; & that was the best teaching of all.

Well you sent even your daintiest & most delicate & fleeting points home to that audience—absolute proof of good reading. But you couldn’t read worth a damn a few years ago. I do not say this to flatter you; it is true.

Sam also wrote of Osgood’s business failure, that he’d seen it coming a year before. Osgood still held the Library of Humor, which Sam said he’d hand to Howells “whenever you want it”—then added that to avoid a mix up perhaps Howells “had better send down & get it.” Sam PS’d derisively that Cable’s response to Pond about the Copyright League wanting him to speak was they’d have to pay his price.

“He is intellectually great—very great, I think—but in order to find room for this greatness in his pygmy carcase, God had to cramp his other qualities more than was judicious, it seems to me” [MTP].

Sam also wrote a short note of condolence to James R. Osgood, wishing him “an early return to prosperity,” then turned around and wrote to Webster, “Osgodo’s busted, at last. It was sure to come” [MTP].

In Boston, Howells wrote to Sam, grateful for the kind words about his recent reading. As to Cable’s refusal to read for charity,

“I don’t see how a reasonably selfish author could have refused to read there. Wasn’t it our own interest we were promoting? Cable ought to have thought that his books were to gain as much as anyone’s. And Warner failed too! Well, the show netted $1700, Lathrop tells me” [MTHL 2: 530].