August 29 Monday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam finished his Aug. 28 to H.H. Rogers.
P.S. Next Day. / Yours of the 19th has arrived [not extant], enclosing letter of Mr. Harper and opinion of Mr. Rives.
Good, I am glad a settlement is close at hand, though I wish Rives wouldn’t always keep on interfering with people’s arrangements.
August 28 Sunday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam replied to Frank E. Bliss’ Aug. 16 (not extant) statement. Sam pointed out the $1,000 for the FE excerpts given to McClure’s wasn’t on the statement— it would be all right if Bliss sent that amount to Rogers. Sam didn’t have any idea what to put in the suggested introduction to his Uniform Edition, and had never seen an intro that had value.
August 20 Saturday – In Bad Ischl, Austria, Sam wrote to John Brisben Walker, owner of Cosmopolitan. Sam had received a check for $120 and a receipt to sign, but in the “confusion of packing” the family for a summer outing, it had been lost. They would return to Kaltenleutgeben in about ten days [MTP].
August 19 Friday – In Bad Ischl, Austria, Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers, thanking him for the news that George Barrow & Son had finally settled, the notice (not extant) of which arrived on Aug. 16 just as they were leaving on a “pleasure trip” to Bad Ischl. Sam was now fully out of debt.
August 18 Thursday – The Clemens family was in Bad Ischl or Hallstatt, Austria on this the second anniversary of Susy’s death.
Sam wrote an eleven-page elegy to Susy Clemens, “Broken Idols”
August 16 Tuesday – In Kaltenleutgeben Sam replied to the Aug. 2 letter of William Dean Howells.
August 12 Friday – H.H. Rogers wrote to Sam, letter not extant but referred to in Aug 28 to Rogers.
August 11 Thursday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Sam wrote to the edtor of the Forum asking if it was not too late he would like to add a sentence to his piece, “About Play-Acting” which he’d mailed on Aug. 3:
“And in still another panic of fright we have this same tough Civilization saving its Honor by condemning an innocent man to multiform death & hugging & whitewashing the guilty one” [MTP; Aug 3 to Rogers].
August 10 Wednesday – Sam’s notebook:
Aug.10. Last night dreamed of a whaling cruise in a drop of water. Not by microscope, but actually. This would mean a reduction of the participants to a minuteness which would make them nearly invisible to God & he wouldn’t be interested in them any longer.
Lying thinking about this, concluded to write a dispute between a microscope & a telescope—one can pull a moral out of that [NB 40 TS 29-30].
August 7 Sunday – Sam’s notebook: “Aug. 7 ’98. I think a few monarchs have died here & there during the past year, I do not now remember. It made a great silence. Bismarck has been dead five or six days, now, but the reverberations from that mighty fall still go quaking & thundering around the planet” [NB 40 TS 28].