Vol 3 Section 0906

“Is the man still in the market who offered you $20,000 & a house on Gillette street? If so, take him up—

      then sell the Gillette street house straight off, for the best price you can get. Rid me of the Hartford house. If any man wants to pay $25,000 cash for it, let him have it” [MTP].

April 12 Sunday

April 13 Monday – Sam took to his bed with a “heavy cold” which turned into bronchitis. He wrote of the five day stay in bed on Apr. 17 to Bigelow.

Roy L. McCardell’s article, “Men of To-Day Who Make the World Laugh. 1. Mark Twain,” ran in the New York World. Budd: “(Source, as given on clipping in Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., is wrong in some detail.) / SLC objects that he had not meant to grant Montague [see Dec. 20, 1902 NY Evening Journal article] a publishable interview (item 188a), while refusing to be interviewed, comments at length that writers should be paid for their words, their stock in trade [Budd, “Supplement” ALR 16.1 (Spring 1983) 71]. Budd’s no. 188b.

April 14 Tuesday – In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote to William Dean Howells.

I shall do my best to enclose the enclosure, & be to that degree eccentric.

It is mighty interesting, but I don’t know whether to allow your work “strange” or not, for it is a thing which happens with the persistency of sunrise. Patents are not frequently born in singles; no, they are twins or triplets. The Patent Office is a vast lying-in hospital for such. As soon as a man breeds a new idea his trencher out mental machinery gives it telepathically away to as many as a million persons round about the globe, & they all think they bred it. Only two or three of them are capable of doing anything with it. You gave Dr. Breen’s Practice to a million, but none but the Rochester girl happened to be in the literary line & able to put it on paper. The sumach culmination was felicitously dramatic—& in that way unusual—but the Breen culmination was more so. And very dramatic also, & prompt & on time, was the case where Voltaire & Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote the same story in the same fortnight, with half a continent between them. I don’t regard as frauds the several claimants to Beautiful Snow & Rock me to… [the rest of the letter is lost] [MTHL 2: 767].

Note:the enclosure is likely “the telepathic story about the sumac,” which Howells would write more about on May 10. Dr. Breen’s Practice, by Howells; see n2 in source. “Beautiful Snow” by John W. Watson, a well known ballad.

Albert Brandt, publisher The Arena magazine, Trenton, N.J., wrote to Sam, offering to publish the Christian Science book since he’d read that Harpers had withdrawn publication. He mentioned what Daniel Carter Beard had told him about CY, that it had “suffered at the hands of some publisher” [MTP]. Note: Brandt would suffer bankruptcy in 1909.

April 15 Wednesday – Sam’s notebook: “Marriage of Julian Hawthorne’s daughter / Ch[urch] New Jerusalem / 35th bet. Park & Lexn / 3 p.m. / [Horiz. Line separator] / J.P. Jones, 237 E 17th / dinner—8” [NB 46 TS 14].

Note: Imogen Hawthorne married Dr. William C. Deming at the Swedenborgian Church (New Jerusalem). Imogen was the daughter of Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), only son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, married Minnie Hawthorne and had seven children that survived childhood, Imogen and three sisters, Gwendolin, Hildegarde, and Beatrix—who were her attendants in the ceremony; and three brothers, Frederick, Henry and J.B.F. Hawthorne who were ushers. [NY Times, Apr. 15, 1903, “What is Doing in Society,” p.9].

Reginald Wright Kauffman of The Press, Phila. wrote to Sam, suggesting that for future Christian Science articles, Sam get “hold of ‘Mother Mary’s poems” from William Archer Purrington of NY,

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