Vol 3 Section 0944

All our books are packed & gone into storage for Italy. Come over there & see us & we will look. We sent a couple of bushels to the little Riverdale library, & I am instructing Miss Lyon to go there & look.

Florentine address——set it down:

Villa Papiniano, San Dominico.

It’s on the slant of the slope & a little to looard of Fiesole. Fiske is not far away. We’ve got it for a year. Our ship is the “Princess Irene,” a new 13,000-tonner; goes to Genoa; sails from Hoboken Oct. 24,

reaches Genoa Nov. 6. With love to you all [MTHL 773-4]. Note: the negotiations for Villa Papiniano were unsuccessful due to shifting demands by the owners (see Smith to his mother, Sept. 20); the family took the Villa di Quarto.

Sam also wrote to Harriet E. Whitmore (Mrs. Franklin G. Whitmore.

Yes, put it in the Courant if you wish—& I think I would say it is from a private letter to a Hartford friend, so that it will have the look of what it is: an entirely voluntary utterance, & by that same token an honest one.

Mrs. Clemens will be very glad if you will take care of the Gifford picture, etc., for her. I have a sort of dim & shadowy recollection of those things, but that is all—nothing definite. I remember spending an evening with Gifford, ages ago.

Mrs. Clemens sends you an affluence of love—& a job, too. She says will you—some time when you are down town, (when the weather gets cool) for there is no hurry—look at the laces in her silver-box in the Safe Deposit & see if they are all right & suffering no injury? And she will be very thankful…. [MTP]. Note: likely

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) of the Hudson River School of painters. In May-July 1867 Sam noted Gifford’s painting “Sunrise on the Seashore” [ MTNJ 1: 318n20]. This, however, predates his courtship with Livy. Robert Swain Gifford (1840-1905) is also a possibility.

July 26 Sunday – Jean Clemens’ 23^rd birthday. Sam inscribed a copy of Antonio Fogazzaro’s Il Mestero del Poeta: “To Jean Clemens on a Birthday. July 26^th, 1903” [MTP: Howard S. Mott Inc. catalog, No. 177,

Item 72. Also, Gribben 235].

July 27 Monday – At Quarry Farm in Elmira, N.Y. Sam wrote to James Whitcomb Riley in Indianapolis, Ind. “The delightful book has arrived, & it is as you say on the fly-leaf:—in it I do find friends of Huck’s & Tom’s, ‘and pards of theirs of Long Ago.’ Thank you cordially, dear old friend, & may we yet meet again!” [MTP]. Note: likely The Book of Joyous Children (1902). The American Monthly Review of Reviews July 1902, Vol. 26, p.753 editorialized that the “touches of uncompromising realisim…make his juveniles like those of Mark Twain and Thomas Bailey Aldrich,—sui generis in contrast to the machine-made boys’ book.” (Not in Gribben.)

July 28 Tuesday – Daniel Willard Fiske wrote from Copenhagen to Sam after having rec’d Sam’s “note of the 14th, belated by its journey around by Florence.” Fiske answered Sam’s questions about the Villa Maiano and the Villa Papiniano, and of Fiske’s gout, which seemed to “thrive as well in the North as in the South” [MTP].

July 29 Wednesday – Samuel M. Bergheim for the Plasmon Syndicate wrote to Sam, having rec’d his letter of July 12 (not extant). He had been laid up or would have answered earlier. “I think you ought to bring the matter you tell me about before the Board of Directors. I think you should write them a strong letter, and put in a claim for the shares which you should have had, and which have evidently been kept back. I should not believe all that Wright says, but still, you might make this statement to the Board as made to you by Mr. Wright.” Bergheim hoped to see him when he came to NY in October. Sam wrote on the env. “The bilks Butters & Wright” [MTP].

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