January 26 Thursday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to Mary Mason Fairbanks.
“Remembering the hatchet, I am your own moral son, which cannot tell a lie, when a body is looking straight at him…make the bride & groom be sure to stop…” —that is, Alice and William Gaylord on their honeymoon [MTL 4: 314].
January 25 Wednesday – Livy and Sam (mostly Livy) wrote to Alice Hooker Day from a Buffalo hospital where Livy took Langdon for a wet nurse. Sam added an apology for an “absurdly curt dispatch” he had sent, probably canceling Isabella Beecher Hooker’s visit [MTL 4: 313-4]. Haughty Isabella was not one of Sam’s favorites.
January 24 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to Elisha Bliss.
January 22 Sunday – Sam wrote from Buffalo, again to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, asking that he not print the paragraph sent on Jan. 15. Aldrich replied on Jan. 25 that it was too late; that the note and his apology had been printed on 42,000 copies of the next edition [MTL 4: 305].
January 21 Saturday – Isaac E. Sheldon wrote to Sam: “Why do you not return the proof sent to you some days since? I fear that it may not have reached you” [MTP].
C.F. Sterling wrote from Birmingham, Conn. to Sam.
January 19 Thursday – Isaac E. Sheldon wrote to Sam: “I send you by this mail 8 or 10 pages of print. / I think that you will like the page” [MTP]
January 18 Wednesday – Isaac E. Sheldon wrote to Sam: “Yours of the 15th just at hand / We will get out the book just as soon as possible. The stereotypers have delayed us.” He included more publishing details for A Burlesque Autobiography [MTP].
January 15 Sunday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to the Editor of Every Saturday, Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), setting him straight that the poem “Three Aces” run in the Express Dec. 3, 1870 over the byline “Carl Byng was not Twain’s. Aldrich complained in the Jan.
January 14 Saturday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to Charles Henry Webb.
“I dissent. I made up my mind solidly day before yesterday that I would draw out of the Galaxy with the April No. & write no more for any periodical—except, at long intervals a screed that I happened to dearly want to write” [MTL 4: 302].
January 13 Friday – Sam visited the new Fairbanks’ home, which had been built after the two fires in 1869. The new place was called “Fair Banks” [MTL 4: 302n5]. He left Cleveland to return home to Buffalo.