January 4 Monday – Sam and Livy left the girls with Sue Crane at the Hotel Royal and traveled to Ilsenburg, Germany in the Hartz Mountains [Jan. 9 to Trumbull]. Sam’s notebook calls the trip “ostensibly four but really seven hours from Berlin.”

Stayed 8 days in the house of Pastor Othmann. He & his wife lovely people. The stoves in our parlor & bedroom not satisfactory. I caught a heavy cough.

The entire society of the village consisted of the old Fürstin von Reuss, her daughter the Princess, & the Pastor & his wife— four people. We made it 6.

The doctor & his wife were not in society; he was a baker’s son & climbed to his doctorship by native gifts & hard work [NB 31 TS 20].

E.P. King wrote on Providence Health Dept. Letterhead to Sam, offering a “Dramatis Personae” and an excerpt of a scene from a play, presumably one he wrote. No explanation was given [MTP].

Mary P. Merchant wrote to Sam, of memories when he was a young man in San Francisco.

Reading an “Innocent Abroad”, “Playing Courier” in Sunday Examiner and seeing the unmistakeable resemblance in the caricature, to a boyish face that once sat opposite me at the Occidental Hotel…[MTP] Note: Mary asked for a photograph and an answering letter.

William W. Phelps wrote from Cairo, Egypt sending Sam and family good wishes, having received Sam’s dispatch, which woke him “before the cry of the donkey-boy” [MTP].