January 4 Monday – Frank B. Darby, Sam’s Elmira dentist, wrote and sent Sam some artwork. He answered Darby’s letter on Jan. 10. Note: Extracts of Darby’s reminiscences of the 1840s to 1895 in Elmira can be found online: http://www.rootsweb.com/~nychenan/raft-rr2.htm and also in some modern reprints of Mildred Cochrane’s A History of the Town of Greene, Chenango County, New York.

In Hartford Sam wrote a two-page letter to James B. Pond. Sam had caught a cold after eating Welsh rarebit with Pond, who was also sick (date uncertain, but it’s possible Pond visited over the holidays). Still irritated by his dealings with George W. Cable, Sam wrote about a future reading in Concord that Cable evidently would only offer Apr. 1 for:

If I had only been at home, I never would have allowed these people to invite Cable; it was the infernalist mistake that was ever made; I could have told them they’d get a slap in the face from him. Thank God, April 1st is too early — it wouldn’t give them time to make their preparations. Now just you stick to April 1, & that will defeat the project. Then we’ll supply Cable’s place with one of those boy pianists of New York, & some violinning by Olla, (I’ll pay these extras myself,) & I’ll do the reading, & the thing will go [MTP]. Sam added that “but for Mrs. Clemens’s restraining hand,” he’d refuse to read with Cable. [See also Jan. 15 to Pond].

William Mackay Laffan for the N.Y. Sun wrote that he could not go to Baltimore this week, but would go any day but Wednesday of the following week. “I will take the precautions requisite to see the machine [Mergenthaler] and to see it under conditions suitable to our point of view” [MTP].