August 4 Friday – Sam paid Estes & Lauriat of Boston $110 for 26 volumes of Agnes & Elizabeth Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest, and other works by the two, including a six-volume work by Mary Anne Everett Green, Lives of the Princesses of England. The bill paid was dated July 28 [Gribben 674].
August 3 Thursday – Charles E.S. Wood wrote: “The White Elephant is now all he ought to be and I’m proud of him. After final disposals here is the residue of 1601. The old sheets I destroyed” [MTP].
August 2 Wednesday – Sam wrote from Elmira to John L. RoBards:
Dear John— / What promise? I hardly ever make one—and never make one that is any trouble to keep. Tell me about this one (for I have forgotten it utterly) & if it isn’t any trouble to keep it, I’ll keep it, as sure as you live—otherwise, I’ll add it, without a twinge of conscience, to the million of the same kind that went before it [MTP].
August 1 Tuesday – Sam also wrote to Charles Webster, who had conveyed the news of illness there.
“It is dismal news. We had the impression that Annie & the children [at this date they had two: Alice, age six; William, nearly four] were to leave for some country place the moment the summer (June) should begin. It seems a very severe attack, but I hope you & Annie are in better hopes & spirits by this time” [MTP].
August – Sometime during the month, Orion wrote Sam with accusations that Charles Webster had defrauded people with the Watch Co.
July 31 Monday – In Elmira Sam replied to the July 22 from Capt. Edmund Gray (b. 1834) a resident of Gray’s Point, Scott County, Missouri, and Cape Girardeau, and steamboat pilot on the Mississippi for many years.
Hang it, no! I haven’t received Dad’s photograph. Maybe it was sent to Osgood, Boston, instead of to me, at Hartford. Was it?—if so, it’s all right & I shall get it.
July 29 Saturday – Robert Jones Burdette (1844-1914) wrote and enclosed a poem from “S.A. Hara,” a pseudonym, one of several, used by the crackpot Bristol Conn. grocer, Wallace Muzzy in his series of non-sensical missives to Twain.
July 28 Friday – Joel Chandler Harris wrote [MTP].
Estes & Lauriat (Boston booksellers) billed Sam for “1 Strickland’s Queens 26 vols 110.00” Marked paid on Aug. 4 [MTP].
William M. Laffan for Harper & Bros. wrote: “Thanks! I will send you a proof anyhow! My glass was not full, but I hastened away and put you in debt to me to the extent of 15c.” He wrote of hot weather in the high 90s [MTP].
July 27 Thursday – Hooker & Co. sent Sam a check for $244.70 for the sale of his old carriage [MTP].
July 26 Wednesday – Jean Clemens’ second birthday.
Sam wrote from Elmira to Charles Webster, about a variety of business matters—Sam had received the “expert’s report” [auditor] of American Publishing’s books, but Sam still didn’t know “whether 50,000 ‘Sketches’ have been sold or not?”—as the man did not specifically mention that book [MTBus 192].