Vol 3 Section 0226

178                                                                        1898

August 7 SundaySam’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 WednesdaySam’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 ThursdayIn 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 TuesdayIn 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.