May 18 Tuesday – Having received Sam’s angry letter, Howells responded:

Your indictment is perfect, but the trodden work remembers details that escape the recollection of the boot-heel.

Howells related how he’d advised Sam to give up on the play on May 2, after Burbank had left the Clemens house unenthusiastic. And he quoted Sam’s words back to him that “there were 9 chances out of ten that it would fail.”

L..       Well, this experience is good, but it almost killed me. The nervous strain of that awful Monday [May 10 after Sam left Boston] is something I haven’t got over yet. It’s perfectly lurid, the retrospect.

Please don’t acknowledge the enclosure [check for $500]. I’m keeping it a secret between me and my Maker. That is, I don’t want my Wife to know it. Yours ever, W.D. Howells [MTHL 2: 564].

In a second letter to Sam, Howells thought he’d been “stupid” about the matter of his check and his wife, and referred to a passage in his novel The Minister’s Charge, when the Rev. Mr. Sewell, “smiled to think how much easier it was to make one’s peace with one’s God than with one’s wife.”  

My mind is beginning to act more promptly than it did in regard to the play; but it still acts wrong first [MTHL 2: 565].

General William B. Franklin sent Sam a circular dated May 5 at West Point to the Graduates of the Military Academy, which announced the next annual meeting of the Association of Graduates in the chapel at 3 P.M., Thursday, June 10, 1886, the hop on June 11 and closing exercises on June 12 [MTP].