August 2 Tuesday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam inscribed a printed drawing of himself with printed signature to Dr. Edwin Pond Parker: “Dear Parker: / Motto to chew on: Saintliness is next to Selfishness* / Truly Yours / Mark Twain / *Being the offspring of it, you see” [MTP].

Sam also sent another printed postcard with signature and drawing to an unidentified person [MTP].

William Dean Howells wrote from York Harbor, Maine to Sam.

Unless I start a letter to you as if you were in the next township, I shall never answer your last. The thought of distance still paralyzes us old people to whom it use to be a fact…Saturday night we had an authors’ show—Page, Mabie, Van Dyke, Warner and I read—for the wounded soldiers and we lacked little or nothing of having you with us. I suppose you cannot realize how often you are on our tongues; if you want to achieve our forgetfulness you must guess again. You have pervaded your century almost more than any other man of letters, if not quite more; and it is astonishing how you keep spreading ….

—Everything literary here is filled with the din of arms, but Providence, which has turned our war for humanity into a war for coaling-stations, seems to have peace in charge and to be bringing it about. I hope so; for then Mrs. Howells and I will stop fighting, she being a Jingo.—How strange for you to be over there so long! You wrote a mighty good paper about Austria, and made the whole thing delightfully intelligible. Disunion seems to keep people together politically as well as matrimonially; but you are the first to note the fact [MTHL 2: 672-4].

Note: Walter Hines Page (1855-1918), ed. of the Atlantic; Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933), essayist and pastor of Princetom (1899-1923).

Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846-1916), critic for the Outlook; the Brick Presbyterian Church, N.Y., Prof. English Lit at