October 23 Thursday – In Hartford Sam wrote a few pages to Joe Goodman, all about typesetter developments and plans. The New York World published an “elaborate & highly complimentary account of the Rogers machine,” which Sam argued produced one-sixth the output of the Paige in a given time.

I guess it is another stock-jobbing operation — it can’t be anything else. The machine has nothing but certain death before it.

I wish you could get a day off & make those two or three Californians buy those privileges [Jones, Mackay, and probably Hearst], for I’m going to need money before long.

I don’t know where the Senator [Jones] is; but out on the coast I reckon.

I guess we’ve got a perfect machine at last. We never break a type, now, & the new device for enabling the operator to touch the last letters & justify the line simultaneously works to a charm.

With love to you both, Mark [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Frederick J. Hall in New York:

Come up here next Tuesday [Oct. 28], and let me know your train. I shall be away until Monday night [Oct. 27].

Sam wanted Hall to “tackle Whitmore” and agree to borrow $10,000 for a year at “8 or 10 per cent,” something he did not want to do earlier [MTP]. Note: Sam’s mother passed away on Oct. 27, and he likely did not receive word till Oct. 28. He was headed to Bryn Mawr the next day.

Annie J. Markham, 17-year old in Allegheny Penn. who had read “every line” by Mark Twain, asked for “a few words in your own dear handwriting” [MTP].

W.H. Merriam wrote from N.Y. to ask Sam to insert “selections” in a volume of American Humorists he was preparing for Walter Scott’s Camelot Series. Sam wrote on the envelope, “Ask him to name the ones he wants” [MTP].