Vol 3 Section 1094

company’s assets for $10,000); and directing him to “wire Truslow at once accordingly.” His second telegram read:

“Strongly advise you to instruct Wheeler not to resist the new Plasmon Board, otherwise you will antagonize interests whose hostility you and your Guggenheim associates can least of all afford to incur. Will explain to Campbell to-morrow / R.W. ASHCROFT” [Ibid.] Note: James Douglas Campbell was Hammond’s private secretary.

Ashcroft also sent a note to James Douglas Campbell reiterating the telegrams to Hammond and urging him to get in touch with Hammond and “induce him to order Wheeler to quit fighting over a dry bone. I will pay Hammond loan Tuesday.”

Sam sided with Ashcroft and the new board of directors. The source states that “Conferences took place between Mr. Clemens and the defendant [Hammond] but without result” [Ibid.] Note: Since Sam was in Deal, N.J. over this next weekend, and Hammond on Sept. 1 was in Gloucester, such “conferences” if kept, would have happened between Sept. 5 and 14. No record of any meetings between Clemens and Hammond was found.

Sam’s notebook: “Died at Greenwich, Conn., my sister, Pamela Moffett, aged about 73. She had been sixty

years an invalid. / [Horiz. Line separator] / Death-dates this year: January 14, June 5, September 1” [MTB

1224; NB 47 TS 17]. Note: Pamela was b. Sept. 13, 1827; just short of 77 years of age.

September 2 Friday – This issue of Collier’s Weekly ran a quote of Sam about Christians and voting:

It will be conceded that a Christian’s first duty is to God. It then follows, as a matter of course, that it is his duty to carry his Christian code of morals to the polls and vote them. Whenever he shall do that, he will not find himself voting for an unclean man, a dishonest man. If Christians would vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease. If the Christians of America could be persuaded to vote God and a clean ticket, it would bring about a moral revolution that would be incalculably beneficent. It would save the country.

September 3 Saturday – In Deal Beach, N.J. Sam wrote to Louise Brownell Saunders (Mrs. A.P.

Saunders) in Clinton, N.Y. (Susy’s old paramour, now married):

Dear Mrs. Saunders: / I am grateful to have those hallowed names thus consecrated, & in reverence I bow my white head before them in their new place. How long they stood for the grace & beauty & joy of life—& now, how they stand for measureless pain & loss!

We are come upon evil days: may they be few! / Affectionately [MTP].

Note: This letter postmarked from Deal Beach, N.J., Sept. 3, 6 p.m. No further information was found about a day trip down the shore, but his publisher, George B. Harvey owned a summer house there. Budd [Collected 2: 993] and F. Kaplan note that Henry James was also a guest at Harvey’s shore retreat. Sam’s arrival date not known, but it was likely a weekend visit.

F. Kaplan writes:

Under a late-summer sun, Mark Twain chatted with Henry James at the New Jersey seashore home of George Harvey. The two literary titans, who had dominated post-Civil War American literature, had each recently crossed the Atlantic, James to return from his home in England for his first visit in twenty years to the city of his birth. Twain had come home that June 1904 with his wife’s body and two shattered daughters, one two thirds of the way to a nervous breakdown. He faced, in a year and a half, his seventieth birthday, and James would face his eight years later, a milestone they and their society

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