June 16 Wednesday – H.H. Rogers cabled Sam about the NY Herald’s fund to help Mark Twain:

“All friends think Herald movement mistake withdraw graciously Langdon approves this / Rogers” [MTHHR 282].

At 23 Tedworth Square in London Sam replied to H.H. Rogers’ cable:

Your cablegram came to-day, but I can’t retire gracefully from the matter because three months ago when I was down in the depths and everything was looking black and hopeless a friend of mine [Frank Fuller] approached me upon this thing and over-persuaded me and I finally gave him my word that if it was ever put before the public I would stand by it and not repudiate it….But even to-day it is not objectionable to me.

Sam recalled private efforts to aid General Grant after the failure of the Grant & Ward brokerage, and his own to aid Dr. John Brown in 1873, which raised $20,000 privately. Even if this project in his behalf were to “end in a humiliating failure” he was used to being humiliated and if he were not so popular, then so be it. He also knew that if he broached the subject to Livy, “she would have forbidden me to touch it,” and so did not tell her when it first came up.

She is troubled about it now, but is good and kind, since I have told her I can’t alter the matter now.

You see, the lightning refuses to strike me—that is where the defect is. We have to do our own striking, as Barney Bernato did. But nobody ever gets the courage till he goes crazy.

He then announced he’d given Frank Bliss half the MS for FE that had been typed, and would send the other half to Rogers once typing was completed. No more had been said about Bliss giving up the de luxe edition rights [MTHHR 283-4]. Notes: Barnett I. Bernato is cited in the source, note 4, “made a spectacular fortune in the South African diamond mines, had committed suicide by leaping from a ship in the mid-Atlantic the day before.” Bliss was back in Hartford by July 3.