October 9 Monday – In New York, William Dean Howells wrote to Sam.

Yes, if I were a great histrionic artist like you, I would get my poor essays by heart, and recite them. But being what I am I should do the thing so lifelessly, that I had better recognize their deadness frankly, and read them.—I begin at Ypsilanti in Michigan the 19th, and I am sick of it already. Perhaps I shall write you of my luck; but I cant talk of it now.—Your beautiful books have come, and I have been reading the last to the family and to myself with a joy that I wish we could share with you. The thing is enormously good. No man ever got himself so honestly out as you have always done, and in Following the Equator the sincerity is notable, even for you. … I want to get a chance somehow to write a paper about you, and set myself before posterity as a friend who valued you aright in your own time [MTHL 2: 707-8].

John Brisben Walker for Cosmopolitan wrote to Sam, enclosing a letter from a teacher at Miami University, who estimated “Mark Twain’s article in the current number of the Cosmopolitan” was worth five years satisfaction to the magazine. Walker’s note:

You may think it is fun to get such a letter as the enclosed, but it is no joke for me. I am forced to send you an additional cheque for two hundred dollars, feeling sure that you were underpaid. I wish my subscribers were not so “damned” appreciative; it is costly. … I am anxiously awaiting your next manuscript. It seems to me that you have knocked Christian Science in this country flat [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env. “Don’t lose this letter. Keep it.”