June 27 Thursday – John Henry Riley wrote from Phila. to Sam: “Friend Clemens / My dear fellow, Are you going to make an effort to come and see me?…I may hold on for a month or so, (who knows?) and I may go off any night.” He was dying of cancer [MTP].
June 26 Wednesday – Date of letter to Sam from J. Langdon & Co. with statement of Livy’s account and enclosed check for $1,018.18 [MTP].
June 24 Monday – Sam receipted $5,000 advance from Elisha Bliss for copyright on Roughing It [MTP].
June 23 Sunday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Joseph L. Blamire, enclosing the preface for Innocents Abroad, which Routledge would publish in two volumes [MTL 5: 110].
June 22 Saturday – Sam signed a new contract with Elisha Bliss, superceding his 1870 contract which called for the African diamond mine book. The new contract gave Sam his ten percent royalty, thus solving the problem he’d had with Roughing It. The contract was not fulfilled until 1879, when Sam and Bliss agreed that The Adventures of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) would be used to satisfy the contract [MTL 5: 101-2].
June 21 Friday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Joseph L. Blamire, NY agent for George Routledge & Sons publishers. Sam made 400 revisions to a copy of Innocents Abroad, in attempt to make the book more palatable to English tastes. He wrote that he expected to be in New York the next Wednesday, staying with Dan Slote.
June 18 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Hartford to Louise Chandler Moulton. Sam thanked the Boston correspondent for the New York Tribune, for her kind review of Roughing It and her sympathies for his “irreparable loss” [MTL 5: 108].
June 17 Monday – Bret Harte wrote from NYC to thank Sam for his concern. He added: “I liked Slote greatly. He is very sweet, sensible and sincere. I think he is truly ‘white’ as you say, or quite ‘candid’ as Mr Lowell would say in his Latin-English. / I enclose your diamond stud, wh. I wore in the cars. …Let me hear from you about Bliss. Tell Mrs. Clemens I deputize you to kiss the baby for me…” [MTP].
June 15 Saturday – Sam wrote from Hartford to William Dean Howells. Sam enclosed a newspaper portrait of himself and begged for a portrait of Howells that appeared in Hearth & Home. He added that 62,000 copies of Roughing It had been sold and delivered in four months [MTL 5: 102-3].
June 13 Thursday – Bret Harte traveled to Hartford and spent the night with the Clemenses. In 1907 Sam claimed that Harte was broke, borrowed $500 and “employed the rest of his visit in delivering himself of sparkling sarcasms about our house, our furniture, and the rest of our domestic arrangements” [MTL 5: 105n2].