Vol 3 Section 0226

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].

August 8 Monday

August 9 Tuesday

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].

In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam also wrote to Mr. Speiser, of the Krantz Hotel. “We intended to come in to-day, but as we learn that we cannot have a good look at the proposed set of rooms in the Krantz before the 16th, we have put off the journey a week or ten days.” Sam added a list of seven room numbers that Livy wanted to preview

[MTP].

August 10 after – Just after the above notebook entry but before Aug. 22, Sam wrote a joke which Gribben writes “may be related to these allusions” of Thomas Moore’s Moses in the Bullrushes: A Sacred Drama (verse), well known at that time:

Teacher. Who was Moses’s mother?

Boy. Pharoah’s daughter.

       No-no—she found him, in the bulrushes. Boy. Yas—that’s what she said.

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 12 Friday – H.H. Rogers wrote to Sam, letter not extant but referred to in Aug 28 to Rogers.

August 13 Saturday

August 14 Sunday

August 15 Monday

August 16 Tuesday – In Kaltenleutgeben Sam replied to the Aug. 2 letter of William Dean Howells.

Your letter came yesterday. It then occurred to me that I maight have known (mental telegraph) that it was due; for a couple of weeks ago when the Weekly came containing that handsome reference to me I was powerfully moved to write you; & my letter went on writing itself while I was at work on my other literature during the day. …But I see, now, that you were writing, about that time, therefore a part of my stir could have come across the Atlantic per mental telegraph.

SLC used mourning border for most letters from Susy’s death on, then from Livy’s death on.