June 14 Monday – At 23 Tedworth Square in London, Sam wrote to William Carey, of Century Magazine.

Oh, bless your heart, that’s been attended to long ago. It was merely a reference, but I was glad I happened to mention it in time for you to get in the protest.

Love to Riley; it was good to hear the voice of him again. Tell him to prepare for the next world while he still has his faculties about him: I mean, tell him to get into debt; then if he goes to hell he will like the change  [MTP].

Note: William Carey (1857-1901), an assistant editor, was “a very clever young man who died in his early forties—more than clever; Mark Twain called him the wittiest man he ever knew…He had charge of the proofs, sending them back and forth between author and printer, and seeing that the forms of The Century went to press on the proper date” [MTNJ 3: 495n43: William Webster Ellsworth, A Golden Age of Authors (1919)]. Robert Underwood Johnson called Carey “a waggish Irish wit,” and gave several examples of it, including a prank played on Richard Watson Gilder [ Remembered Yesterdays 94]. On Oct. 18, 1901 in New Haven, Conn., Carey would die suddenly of heart failure in his 44th year [NY Tribune Oct. 21,1901, p.9]. Carey once convinced Sam to give a reading with James Whitcomb Riley that Sam always felt was a gigantic failure. See Feb. 20, 1894.