May 13 Thursday – Back in Hartford in a rare show of ill-will to Howells, Sam vented, beginning a letter which he added to on May 15 and 17:
No, no, sir — I’m not going to let you shoulder a solitary ounce of the “folly” onto me! Observe:
L.. It was I who had written Webster that no terms in the world would induce me, etc., etc; it was you who said “Why not let Burbank have it?”
2. It was you who had made up your mind, Monday morning, that the business engagements of twelve hours before were a mistake & must be throttled; you still had 48 hours in which to say “You are to meet Burbank Wednesday noon — squelch this whole thing before the hourly breeding vested rights in it shall make the squelching a costly undertaking.” But you didn’t say it. You let me sit there in Webster’s office…in the legal & expensive background, & go through the profound unwisdom of tying myself to an actor with a gold thread, & tying the actor to a Hebrew manager [Frohman] with a log-chain, by contracts which you had already, two days before, privately, decided against.
…
There — what I’m jumping on top of, & taking by the neck, hair & ears in this schadenfreudig way, is your gentle, & even Christlike concession that “the folly was mine as much as yours.” No, my boy, I pile it all onto you; every ounce of it [MTHL 2: 559-60]. See May 15 and 17 entries for additions.
In his 1911 reminiscence, Memories of a Manager, Daniel Frohman told the story from his perspective:
The play I refer to was one he wrote in conjunction with W.D. Howells, called The American Claimant, which was to be produced at the Lyceum in 1886 by A.P. Burbank, a popular lecture platform entertainer. Having read the play, I rented the Lyceum for a few weeks, before my regular season, to Mr. Clemens. The piece was full of humor. The hero was an inventor [Sellers as a Scientist]. One of his inventions was a fire-extinguisher. With this machine he makes his first entrance on the stage, and with it almost sets fire to the apartment. Rehearsals showed that the work was not likely to prove successful, and after some litigious correspondence between Mr. Clemens and myself I arranged to accept a suitable solatium for the time the withdrawal of the piece left vacant [50-51].
Pamela Moffett arrived at the Clemens home after a N.Y. visit with her daughter, Annie Moffett Webster and Charles Webster from Apr. 24. She would stay until May 20 [MTNJ 3: 236n33].