August 2 Monday – In Weggis, Switzerland Sam took advantage of a library to obtain new reading material. Sam’s notebook:
“Aug. 2. Monday. Left 5 fr at the circulating library; 3 are a deposit, the 2 pay for 2 books a week. I took a couple of Trollope’s—2 vol. each” [NB 42 TS 23].
In York Harbor, Maine, William Dean Howells wrote to Sam.
My dear Clemens: 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 used to be a fact. I know this will find you in Austria before I can well turn round, but I must make believe you are in Kennebunkport before I can begin it.—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.
Howells then wrote of the accidental nature of the literary colony in York Harbor, something Sam would experience in a few years. He touched on the weather, his wife’s health, and the work he did on his “gewöhnlich novel” (Their Silver Wedding Journey). He confided that Alden had ended the “Editor’s Study” in Harpers, he being “against all departments, as not modern.” He then related politics:
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.
He thought “Stirring Times in Austria” was “a mighty good paper,” that Sam made “the whole thing delightfully intelligible” [MTHL 2: 672-4]. Note: persons noted: Walter Hines Page, currently ed. of the Atlantic; Hamilton Wright Mabie, critic for the Outlook; Henry Van Dyke, popular essayist and pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church, NYC.
[Note: This is probably not a good place for this note as Stirring Times was not published until 1898 in Harper's Monthy March, 1898 (Volume 96), pp. 530-40.]