August 3 Wednesday – On a warm day in Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

I must stop work a minute and congratulate you upon to-day’s telegraphic peace-prospects. I imagine you are feeling comfortable now.

Here the matter would be immensely discussed and written about—would have been, a week ago—but now it is cut down to a dozen lines, for now the whole reading-matter space in the papers is crowded with Bismarck’s life and death. It has been so for several days ….

Insert: Hotel Krantz

Sam wrote of the dense, green foliage with no browning, and no flies or bugs or mosquitoes. Their plans were to return to Vienna in mid-October, and were letting the Hotel Metropole bid for their residence against the newer Hotel Krantz. There was some concern for available rooms, what with the Jubilee of the coronation of Emperor Franz Joseph I (1830-1916) of Austria to be celebrated in Vienna on Dec. 2. Livy had gone into the Krantz and “found on the lobby wall the finest portrait” of Sam she’d ever seen.

He also suggested that Katharine I. Harrison might collect his articles when she returned from vacation, and listed pieces which had been, or were about to be published:

“In Memoriam, Olivia Susan Clemens” (Harper’s Nov. 1897)

“Stirring times in Austria” (Harper’s Mar. 1898)

“From the ‘London Times’ of 1904” (Century, Nov. 1898)

“The Appetite Cure” (Cosmopolitan, Aug. 1898)

“About Play-Acting” (“Forum—mailed to New York to-day”; Oct. Forum).

He listed three not yet mailed:

“The Great Republic’s Peanut Stand,” (unpublished)

“Concerning the Jews,” (Harper’s Sept. 1899)

“My Platonic Sweetheart” (published after Sam’s death by Harper’s Dec. 1912).

I got $2,075 for the first four; am to get $200 for the fifth.

I think I shall keep the article on copyright (“Peanut Stand”) for the present.

I’ve a notion to send the “Sweetheart” story to you, and then write Edward Bok of the Ladies’ Home Journal that if he wants to pay $1000 for it he can write you and get it. I half promised him a $500-article a year ago. If he declines, I’ll send you the “Jew” article, and let Harper’s take choice between it and the “Sweetheart” (at their own price) and let the Century have the unchosen one (at its own price.) They are thundering good—I don’t know which one I like the best. / Yours sincerely… [MTHHR 355].

Notes: Terms of the peace treaty between the US and Spain were being negotiated, and would be completed on Aug. 12. Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), the man who united Germany, died July 30.