August 12 Thursday – Moncure Conway wrote from Easton, Pa. to Sam. “Love and greeting to you and your dear lady!” he asked where Sam was as they would be in Newport and Boston next week, then sail for Liverpool Nov. 27 [MTP].
August 11 Wednesday – John Milton Hay wrote from Wash. D.C. “I sent you my speech the other day. / Please let me know where you are at this moment. I have something to send you which ought to go into your own lily-white hands. Yours…” [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Col. John Hay, author of the ‘Pike County Ballads.” See Gribben p. 303 listing this work as 1871.
August 9 Monday – Sam wrote to the editors of the River Record about articles they’d referred to which he intended to publish in book form after visiting the Mississippi again. These would become Life on the Mississippi. Sam realized that since he’d left the river, new boats had come and gone. “Yours is a very good paper,” he wrote, “but it makes a person baldheaded to read it” [MTLE 5: 140].
August 7 Saturday – Robert Thornton Lowery (1859-1921) wrote from Petreola, Ontario to Sam:
August 6 Friday – Lilly G. Warner wrote to Sam, thanking him for his letter from baby Jean, and very concerned after hearing Livy was worse [MTP].
August 5 Thursday – Lucy Adams Perkins wrote to Sam with congratulations and concern for Livy. She related their house being burgled “again…at the same parlor window.” A policeman heard the window slide and came to find the burglar in the parlor; he fired a shot at him as he fled into the bushes, but missed him [MTP].
August 3 Tuesday – What Fishkin calls “noisy hoopla that engulfed Elmira” was the arrival and speech of Frederick Douglass. “The event drew delegations from virtually every city and town within a hundred miles. Sixty-three guns were fired at 11 A.M. Well before the parade began, the ‘excitement reached the white folks, and the streets were thronged with expectant people.’” At least four bands provided music. The parade route went around the Langdon home.
August 2 Monday – Jane Clemens wrote from Van Buren to baby Jean.
August 1 Sunday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Howells asking him to locate a book at a Boston store for him. He added a short paragraph on the new baby’s progress, saying they’d hoped for twins [MTLE 5: 139].
Sam also wrote to Frank E. Bliss, forwarding a letter and enclosures intended for the American Publishing Co.
August – Sam’s sketch, “Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale” ran in the August issue of the Atlantic Monthly [Wells 23]. Wilson calls this “a humorless moral tale that satirizes several aspects of nineteenth-century American culture” [68]. $50 check from Houghton, Mifflin & Co. dated Aug. 2 and deposited Aug. 6 for this article is in the MTP, 1880 financial file.