To Olivia L. Clemens
18 April 1875 • Cambridge, Mass.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01220)

Mond Sunday

Livy Darling:

We are having a jolly good time here, I can tell you, & mighty sorry I am that you are not here.1 You must come next time, sweetheart.2 I enclose an impromptu by little Winnie Howells. S‸he‸ ie always writes an elaborate poem in honor of her father’s birth-day, & fits it to the occasion —but this time she forgot it until the night before & so had to choose a foreign subject & the first that suggested itself.3 She painted a harebell in water colors at the top of the page, which I have rudely copied. If this child hasn’t genius I don’t know one that has.

I do hope you ain’t lonely tonight my child.

Always lovingly

Samℓ.

[enclosure:]

Sweet flower what makes

thee hold thy head so low,

Lift up unto the sky thy fair pale

face,

Thou that art the noblest flower

on earth,

Lift & show the passers by thy

grace.

over

Then as I looked & pondered

O’er my thoughts,

The harebell raised its wondering

eyes to me,

And said, “he putteth down

the mighty from their throne,

And he exalteth those of low

degree.”

Winnie.

March Ist, 1875.

{Written & composed by Winnie Howells, in honor of her father’s birth-day. She is a child of eleven years—daughter of W. D. Howells.}

Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens.
Farmington avenue
Hartford,
Conn [return address:] the atlantic monthly. the riverside press, cambridge, mass. [postmarked:] cambridge station mass. apr 19

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 The “jolly good time” included an attempt to attend the centennial celebrations at Concord and Lexington that commemorated the 19 April 1775 battle of the minutemen against British troops. In 1910, in “My Mark Twain,” Howells recalled that he and Clemens had received special invitations that included transportation from Boston, but they decided to depart from Cambridge instead. When they arrived at the station, they found the train so packed with celebrants that they could not board. After various futile efforts to find transportation to Concord, Clemens began to suffer “acute indigestion, which gave his humor a very dismal cast.” A last chance, Howells wrote, came when Clemens chased after a coach with a group of students on top “but luxuriously empty inside. . . . The unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me.” The two men returned to Howells’s house, where they warmed themselves in front of a roaring fire, and then, absurdly and ineffectually, tried to hoax Mrs. Howells with the claim that their trip had been a success. Howells concluded, “I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been” (Howells 1968, 280–82).

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2 Olivia explained her absence in a letter of 23 April to Elinor Howells:

Don’t dream for one instant that my not getting a letter from you kept me from Boston—I am too anxious to go to let such a thing as that keep me—A wet nurse that is tractable and good when I am in the house but who gets drunk when I go away, together with other irresponsible doings by this same nurse when I am not present, lead me to feel that I had better stay closely with my baby until she is weaned, which will not be until next October— (MH-H)

For Clemens’s account of this wet nurse, see 16 Mar 75 to Howells, n. 2.

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3 Howells’s thirty-eighth birthday was 1 March.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). The letter quoted in note 2, Olivia Clemens to Elinor Howells, 23 Apr 75, is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).

Previous publication: L6, 449–451.

Provenance:See Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.