December 21 Tuesday – In Vienna, Austria Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

Sam agreed that the letters from many of the creditors made his “heart glad.” With the “hateful burden” of debt soon to be extinguished, made his “same heart as light as Colby’s brain or the soul of the Mount Morris.” He commented on Rogers’ praise of FE and of the struggle he’d made to write it:

I am very glad you like the book. The London papers & the Vienna papers like it, & so do my personal friends in England & here. I believe their testimony to be square. And I can add to it my own—I like the book myself. All of this shows—what? That the common notion that a book infallibly reveals the man & his condition is a mistake. This book has not exposed me. It pretends to an interest in its subject—which was mostly not the case. It pretends that it was freely spouted out of a contented heart—not the forced work of a rebellious prisoner fretting in chains. Well Gott sei Dank it is over & done with; I would rather be hanged, drawn & quartered than write it again. All the heart I had was in Susy’s grave & the Webster debts. And so, behold a miracle!—a book which does not give its writer away [MTHHR 309-10].

Sam also wrote to Katharine I. Harrison, the letter not extant but referenced in Harrison’s Jan. 7, 1898 letter [MTHHR 314].