I only say it may—­I cannot venture to say it will.  Hartford is not a large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort.  Three or four weeks ago, at a Moody and Sankey meeting, the preacher read a letter from somebody “exposing” the fact that a prominent clergyman had gone from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank it on the premises (a drug store.)

A tempest of indignation swept the town.  Our clergymen and everybody else said the “culprit” had not only done an innocent thing, but had done it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody’s right or business to find fault with it.  Perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact that we never have any temperance “rot” going on in Hartford.

I find here a letter from Orion, submitting some new matter in his story for criticism.  When you write him, please tell him to do the best he can and bang away.  I can do nothing further in this matter, for I have but 3 days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a bushel and a half of letters.  I am very nearly tired to death.

I was so jaded and worn, at the Taylor dinner, that I found I could not remember 3 sentences of the speech I had memorized, and therefore got up and said so and excused myself from speaking.  I arrived here at 3 o’clock this morning.  I think the next 3 days will finish me.  The idea of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous.

A young lady passenger in our ship has been placed under Livy’s charge.  Livy couldn’t easily get out of it, and did not want to, on her own account, but fully expected I would make trouble when I heard of it.  But I didn’t.  A girl can’t well travel alone, so I offered no objection.  She leaves us at Hamburg.  So I’ve got 6 people in my care, now—­which is just 6 too many for a man of my unexecutive capacity.  I expect nothing else but to lose some of them overboard.

We send our loving good-byes to all the household and hope to see you
again after a spell. 
                         Affly Yrs. 
                                        Sam.

There are no other American letters of this period.  The Clemens party, which included Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, sailed as planned, on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878.  As before stated, Bayard Taylor was on the ship; also Murat Halstead and family.  On the eve of departure, Clemens sent to Howells this farewell word: 

“And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art.  I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it, or to be unaware of it.  Nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much.”

A characteristic tribute, and from the heart.