December 15 Thursday – In Florence at 3 or 4 a.m., Sam couldn’t sleep so wrote to daughter Clara at Mrs. Mary B. Willard’s school in Berlin. He’d finished revising PW the evening before. “Writing never tired me, but the revising has done that.” He also told of receiving a letter from Laurence Hutton (“Uncle Larry”) from Rome. He added a bit of family news:

You will be charmed by Susy’s singing. She has made very great & rapid improvement, & it is a genuine pleasure to hear her.

All the family are fussing over Xmas, of course, & Mamma went down town & shopped herself into bed one day. I’m going down to-morrow to see if I can roust out a Xmas present for her, & I suppose I shall make a botch of it. But I’ve got to try: Susy & Jean won’t do it for me.

Sam closed with a humorous argument he’d had with Mrs. Carolyn S. Fahnstock:

I must think-up a letter to write to Mrs. Fahnestock, with whom I have a quarrel about antiquity of lineage. She tries to claim that the Fahnestock-Mont-Ughi’s is an older family than the Cerretani-Viviani-Clemenses, because the villa they live in is eleven hundred years old — which is nothing to the point. Our family got burnt out at Sodom & Gomorrah and could not collect the insurance, & were never able to build again until 200 years ago, when they built this villa. I can’t bear those upstart modern families, like the Fahnestock-Mont-Ughis.

I love you, love you, dear old Ben, & send you Merry Xmas! / Papa.[Note: Carolyn S. Fahnstock]

Sam also wrote to Laurence Hutton, at this time in Rome. He discussed Hutton’s handwriting, which he said was “as easy as the Angel of Death’s,” Willard Fiske’s last two visits, the family’s health, and sent his regards to the Binghams.

She [Livy] is pretty well — as well as she ever is in the last weeks preceding Xmas. I think Xmas was invented to knock out the health & strength accumulated in the previous 11 months & shorten people’s lives 10 per cent a year — & does its work & accomplishes its mission with fiendish certainty.

Susy is in good health & good spirits, & is becoming a lark, under the training of a capable singing-master. Jean’s got some kind of an eruption on her mouth which [Dr.] Baldwin is wrestling with. Clara is having a handsome good time at school in Berlin, & is well contented. I finished my book a week ago, & if you were only here now, how gladly I would put the revising aside & infest the holy places of Florence with you! [MTP].

Conn. Governor Reception sent a printed invitation to Mr. & Mrs. Clemens for the Inaugural Reception for the Governor on Jan. 4, 1893. [MTP].

Arthur Hornblow for Palmer’s Theatre, N.Y. wrote asking for Sam’s photograph for a planned article, similar to one in the Dec. issue of Cosmopolitan by Hornblow on French journalists [MTP].