May 28 Tuesday – Sam reported to the Alta and criticized the dry goods multimillionaire’s home (Alexander T. Stewart) saying that it looked “like a mausoleum”: “Verily it is one thing to have cash and another to know how to spend it” [MTL 1: 6-9n11]. Fresh in New York back in 1853 (“I was a pure and sinless sprout”), Sam had been impressed by Stewart’s “Marble Palace,” an ostentatious dry-good store, but now Sam was older and wiser and saw that all that glittered was not in good taste. He extolled the virtues of Daniel Slote (1828?-1882) as his cabin-mate to be: [Slote] “has got many shirts, and a History of the Holy Land, a cribbage-board and three thousand cigars. I will not have to carry any baggage at all” [MTL 3: 177n3].
Note: Sometime in late May Sam met Daniel Slote, a bachelor older than Sam and soon to be a fellow passenger on the Quaker City. Sam visited Dan’s home during the end of May, where Dan’s mother, a widow, lived with Dan and his two single adult sisters.