To Orion and Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens
10 June 1874 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01096)

Elmira, June 10.

Dear Orion & Mollie:

The child was born day before yesterday, 7 A.M. We are up at the farm on the hill; so we got Mrs. Geleason & Della to come up Sunday evening & sleep here, so as to be ready.1

The babe is a girl,2 & weighed 7/¾ 73/ nearly 8 pounds—which is colossal for Livy; Susie weighed only 4 pounds, & Langdon 3½. However the child is really but a small creature, but is very round & compact & solid. It could whip Susie at four weeks, with one hand tied behind it—& yet Susie was not a weakling.

Livy is doing amazingly well—is cheerful, happy, grateful & strong. The Modoc is as brown as an Indian, because ‸she‸ is seldom or never in the house, but is tramping around outside in the sun & wind., all day.

I judge by Mollie’s letter of today that you are having cheerier times than your first outlook there promised, & we are both sincerely glad that it is so. A little quiet, & open air, mixed with a body’s life go far to make it endurable; & when the bodily rest after bodily fatigue comes in, life does not fall greatly short of being a luxury.3

I paid Downey four months’ wages & discharged him. I did it because I wanted Patrick & could get him, & had no reasonable excuse for discharging Downey, except that he wasn’t worth more than the half of $55 a month & I didn’t like to tell him so unkind a thing as that. Downey never would have been able to do the work at the new place—& besides, we prefer Patrick to everybody else, when he is straight—& his wife seems to keep him straight now.4

But it is very late, & I must send love & say good night for both of us. And I send love to all my old friends there, too.5

Yrs

Sam.

Orion [ M ] Clemens Esq
Keokuk
Iowa. [on flap:] SLC/MT [postmarked:] elmira n. y. [jun ] 11

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Olivia’s physician, Rachel Brooks Gleason, was now associated with her sister, Dr. Lucy Zipporah Brooks Wales, and her brother-in-law, Dr. Theron A. Wales, as well as her physician husband, Silas, in the Elmira Water Cure. The Gleasons’ daughter, Adele (Della), received her medical degree from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in 1875 (L4, 335 n. 2; Elmira Advertiser: “City and Neighborhood,” 29 Jan 74, 4; “Dr. Zippie Brooks Wales Passes Away,” 5 July 1912, 5; information courtesy of Herbert A. Wisbey; “Personal References,” 94).

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2 Named Clara, after Olivia’s friend Clara Spaulding (11 July 74 to JLC). The Elmira Advertiser waited until 8 July to report the birth: “Mark Twain is now entitled to Mark Thrice. This time it is a girl and pulls down seven and a half pounds” (“City and Neighborhood,” 4).

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3 Neither the letter from Mollie Clemens received on 10 June nor her and Orion’s earlier letters from Keokuk have been found. Both sent lengthy replies to Clemens’s present letter, Orion’s dated 14 June, Mollie’s undated but probably written on the same day. The letters mingled congratulations on the new baby with reports of snakes, hens, a toad, and other particulars of farm life. And Mollie alluded to a snag in her plan to buy, and not merely rent, her father’s farm: “Pa asks $2,500 for his place, for the prospective water power for manufacturing; but we see no probability of such an enterprise and aside from that his land is worth $200 an acre, for the 4 acres $800, or with the houses $1200” (CU-MARK). That is, William Stotts had increased his original price of $2,000, while still expecting Orion and Mollie to assume the existing $450 mortgage (23 Apr 74 to OC, n. 1). They, however, had now decided that the property was worth $800 less. Resigning herself for the moment to merely renting, Mollie hoped for better in the future. “If we succeed here,” she wrote Clemens, “and can buy a place, we can have a lovely home with comparatively little expense.” But almost a year later she and Orion were still renting, and still trying to buy, the Stotts farm (27 Mar 75 to OC).

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4 Downey, fired by mail in May, had worked for Orion and Mollie in the spring of 1872, while they cared for the Clemenses’ house in Hartford. In her letter of 14 June, Mollie told Clemens: “You acted nobly ‸generously‸ by Downy” (CU-MARK). Mary McAleer evidently kept her husband, Patrick, “straight” by keeping him from drinking (8 May 74 to Perkins; L5, 87 n. 1, 89 n. 8, 127; “Coachman Many Years for Mark Twain,” Hartford Courant, 26 Feb 1906, 6).

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5 From mid-June 1855 until mid-October 1856 Clemens lived mostly in Keokuk, while working in Orion’s print shop, the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In July 1860 he spent three weeks there between Mississippi River piloting assignments, and visited again in April 1867 to deliver his Sandwich Islands lecture (L1, 58–59, 69, 101 n. 1; L2, 20 n. 2).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L6, 155–157.

Provenance:see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

M • [partly formed; doubtful]

jun • [ju] n [badly inked]